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FREDERIC  OZANAM 


PROFESSOR  AT  THE  SORBONNE 


HIS  LIFE  AND  WORKS 


BY    • 

KATHLEEN  OMEARA 

(GRACE   RAMSAY) 

AUTHOR  OF    "PEARL,   A   STORY  OF   ENGLISH   AND  FRENCH    UFE  IN 
THE  DAYS  OF  NAPOLEON  " 


WITH    A    PREFACE 

By  his  eminence  CARDINAL  MANNING 

PREFACE   TO   THE   PRESENT   EDITION 
BY 

THOMAS   M.  MULRY 

FRBSIDENT  OF  SUPERIOR  COUNCIL  OF  NBW  YORK,  SOCIBTY  OF  ST.  VINCBNT  DB  PAUL 


NEW  YORK 

CHRISTIAN  PRESS  ASSOCIATION 
PUBLISHING  COMPANY 


Copyright,  191  i, 

BY 

CHRISTIAN  PRESS  ASSOCIATION  PUBLISHING 
COMPANY. 


CONTENTS 


Preface, xi 

CHAPTER  1.-1813-31. 

Antiquity  of  the  family  of  the  Ozanams — family  treasures — story  of  Jere- 
miah Hozannam — Jacques  Ozanam  and  his  nephew  Benedict — CcU«er 
of  Antoine,  father  of  Frederic — Birth  of  Frederic  at  Milan,  in  1813 — Set- 
tlement of  his  father  in  Lyons  as  a  physician — Characteristics  of  Frede- 
ric's childhood — Early  confessions — School  life — Period  of  questioning 
and  doubt — Becomes  a  pupil  of  Abbe  Noirot — Noirot's  testimony  regard- 
ing him — Becomes  clerk  in  an  attorney's  office — Writes  a  treatise 
against  the  St.  Simonians — receives  congratulations  from  M.  de  Lamar- 
tine — Studies  the  state  of  society  in  France — Views  and  ambitions  at 
the  age  of  seventeen — Programme  of  future  work — His  ideas  of  true 
glory — His  freedom  from  the  mere  ambition  of  making  money  and  a 
position,  in  the  worldly  sense, x 

CHAPTER  n.— 1831. 

Ozanam  enters  on  his  legal  studies  in  Paris — first  experiences — Stands 
aloof  from  his  fellow-students  at  the  Ecole  de  Droit,  on  account  of  their 
opinions — Boarding-house  grievances — Impressions  of  Paris — Visit  to 
M.  Ampere  ;  becomes  an  inmate  of  his  house — his  new  manner  of  life 
described — First  interview  with  M.  Chiteaubriand — Aim  of  his  studies 
— longing  for  noble  work — Opposing  school  of  Philosophy — the  Ration- 
alistic  and  the  Traditional, 17 

CHAPTER  III.— 1831. 

State  of  religion  in  France  subsequent  to  the  Revolution — Reign  of 
Atheism— Napoleon — The  Abb6  Foumier — the  Concordat  of  1801 — 
Radical  Catholicism  of  France — Attitude  of  Napoleon  towards  the 
Church— His  policy  towards  the  clei^— And  the  press — How  he  dealt 
with  the  department  of  Public  Instruction — Imperial  University — His 
instructions  to  the  Minister  of  Public  Worship — divorce  established— the 
Sabbath  altered — The  Concordat  of  Fontainebleau,  Napoleon,  and  Pof)e 
Pius  VII. — Fall  of  Napoleon  and  restoration  of  the  Bourbons — the 
reign  of  faith  restored  only  in  appearance — Attempt  at  converting  the 
nation — Revival  of  Voltairianism — Ozanam,  in  his  capacity  of  a  Chris- 
tian teacher,  a  witness  for  God  to  his  generation, 25 


8()210Ja 


iv  Contents. 

CHAPTER  IV.— 1832. 

VAGB 

State  of  society  in  France  after  the  Revolution  of  1830 — The  Abb6  de 
l^amennais — Incident  connected  with  M.  Letrone's  lectures  at  the  Col- 
lege de  France — Ozanam  and  Lallier — Catholic  young  men  finding  each 
otlier  out — Rationalism  and  Revelation — letter  to  Ernest  Falconnet — 
Conferences  of  the  Abbe  Gerbet — Passage  of  arms  between  Professor 
Jouffroy  and  a  young  Catholic  at  the  Sorbonne — Result  of  this  on  Oza- 
nam, and  en  the  tone  of  the  teaching  of  the  Professors,  .        .        .        .41 

CHAPTER  v.— 1833. 

Advantages  accruing  to  Ozanam  from  his  residence  with  M.  Ampere — His 
love  of  science — Tendency  to  dicouragement — anxiety  about  the  future 
— Tour  in  Italy — Dante  and  Raphael, 47 

CHAPTER  VI.— 1833. 

The  young  Catholics  befriended  by  M.  Bailly — His  newspaper,  the  Tri' 
bune  Catholique — Opens  his  office  as  a  lecture-room  and  debating-hall — 
Removal  to  a  spacious  hall  in  the  Place  de  I'Estrapade — Account  of  the 
debates — Increase  of  the  Society — Soirees  at  M.  de  Montalembert's,       .    53 

CHAPTER  VIL— 1833. 

Hostility  to  the  young  Catholics  continues  unabated — Professor  Jouffroy 
an  exception — The  enemy's  taunt :  "Show  us  your  works  !  " — Ozanam's 
suggestion  at  this  juncture — First  practical  meeting  in  Pere  Bailly's  of- 
fice, and  presided  over  by  him — Formation  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent 
de  Paul — its  work  among  the  poor — Sceur  Rosalie — Rules  of  the  Society 
— Ozanam's  first  proteges — Hesitation  at  first  as  to  the  admission  of  new 
members — Rapid  growth  of  the  Society,  as  related  by  Ozanam  twenty 
years  later — The  title  of  Founder  always  repudiated  by  him — Brave 
manifestation  on  the  part  of  the  Catholic  students  described  by  Oza- 
nam in  a  letter  to  his  mother— procession  at  Nanterre — God  preparing  a 
powerful  and  brilliant  champion '59 

CHAPTER  VIII.—1834. 

Fall  of  M.  de  Lamennais — The  Abbe  Gerbet— M.  de  Montalembert— Anti- 
Christian  spirit  manifested  at  the  Sorbonne  at  this  time — The  preaching 
of  the  Paris  clergy — The  Abbe  Lacordaire — his  first  oratorical  successes 
at  the  College  Stanislas — First  idea  of  his  "Conferences"  due  to  Oza- 
nam— Proposal  to  Monseigneur  de  Quelen,  Archbishop  of  Paris — La- 
cordaire's  consent  obtained — Ozanam  and  others  again  visit  the  Arch- 
bishop—Lamennais  at  the  Archbishop's— The  proposal  divulged  in  the 
Univers — The  Archbishop's  scheme  to  meet  the  wishes  of  the  young 
men — Lacordaire's  Sunday  addresses  at  the  College  Stanislas — His  sub- 
jects— Ozanam's  admiration  and  regret 69 


Contents.  ▼ 

CHAPTER  IX.— 1834.35. 

Osanam's  uncertainty  as  to  his  vocation — His  repug^nanc*'  to  leadership — 
Memorable  soiree— Antagonism  of  the  world — Political  formula— Holi- 
days spent  at  Lyons — his  impression  of  the  changes  during  his  two  years' 
absence— Visit  to  the  Chateau  de  St.  Point  to  see  Lamartine — The  in- 
terview described — Letters  in  reference  to  the  poor  and  the  Society  of  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul— Charity  and  philanthropy — Return  of  old  scruples 
and  anxieties— Illness  of  his  mother— visit  to  Lyons— The  cholera 
averted  from  Lyons, 80 


CHAPTfR  X.— 1835-36. 

Attitude  of  the  clei^  towards  Lacordaire's  Conferences — Hesitation  of  the 
Archbishop— Lacordaire  remonstrates— The  Archbishop  proposes  a  con- 
dition of  resuming  the  Conferences  which  Lacordaire  could  not  accept — 
Despair  of  Ozanam  and  his  friends — The  Abbe  Liautard,  founder  of  the 
College  Stanislas,  writes  a  vigorous  expostulation — Lacordaire  visits 
the  Archbishop — Sudden  revulsion  in  the  Archbishop's  mind — appoint- 
ment of  Lacordaire  to  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame,  and  named  Canon  of 
the  Cathedral — Ozanam  and  Lacordaire,      ^ 9' 

CHAPTER  XL— 1837. 

Close  of  Ozanau's  legal  studies— Indecision  as  to  his  real  vocation — Enters 
on  his  duties  as  a  barrister— Death  of  his  father — Anecdote  in  reference 
to  his  knowledge  of  Hebrew— Devotedness  to  his  mother — The  munici- 
pality of  Lyons  petitions  that  Ozanam  be  appointed  to  a  proposed  Chair 
of  Commercial  Law — His  own  feelings  in  regard  to  it — Antipathy  to 
the  married  state — Acquisition  of  the  dignity  of  Doctor  of  Law— Visit 
to  La  Grande  Chartreuse — His  ideal  of  a^  wife— Incompatibility  felt  by 
him  between  the  professionoF  tKe  bar  and  the  pursuit  of  literature — 
Seeks  to  combat  in  others  the  depression  experienced  by  himself — Remi- 
niscences of  Italian  travel — The  great  social  question,    ....    99 


^ 


CHAPTER  XII.— 1838-39. 

Degree  of  Doctor  of  Letters — Thesis  on  Dante — Failure  of  his  mother's 
health — his  anxiety  regarding  the  younger  members  of  the  family — The- 
sis on  Dante  extended  and  published — Nomination  as  Professor  of 
Commercial  Law  at  Lyons — Philosophical  Professorship  at  Orleans 
offered  by  M.  Cousin,  but  declined — Cousin's  announcement  to  him  of 
his  nomination  to  the  Municipal  Chair — Growing  importance  of  the 
Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul — Opposition  encountered  by  it — Impor- 
tance  attached  by  him  to  correspondence  between   the  various  Con- 


ferences— The  two  hostile  camps  existing  in  society — The  power  of 


friendship, 


:x.£ 


vi  Contents. 

CHAPTER  XIII.— 1839. 

PAGE 

Failure  of  Ozanam's  new  position  as  Professor  to  set  his  mind  at  rest — 
his  mother — doubts  as  to  his  vocation — His  views  on  marriage — This 
period  the  most  agitated  of  his  life — M.  Cousin — M,  de  Montalembert — 
Lacordaire  and  the  Order  of  St.  Dominic — Conferences  of  St,  Vincent 
V'  de  Paul  invited  by  Ozanam  to  meet  Lacordaire  at  Lyons — Reply  of 
Ozanam  to  Lacordaire's  letter  from  Rome — symptoms  of  a  monastic 
vocation — Lacordaire's  answer — Letter  on  the  death  of  Madame  Oza- 
nam— Communion  with  his  mother's  spirit, 116 

CHAPTER  XIV.— 1840-41. 

Ozanam's  Cours  de  Droit — crowds  attracted — Renewed  perplexities  about 
his  vocation — Sympathy  with  domestic  joys — Matrimonial  traps — Visit 
to  Paris — meeting  with  old  friends — Position  of  Catholics  in  France — 
Renewed  overtures  from  M.  Cousin — Resolves  to  compete  for  the  Agrd- 
gation  de  litterature — the  issue  to  be  accepted  as  the  final  indication  of 
his  destiny — The  Abbe  Noirot's  advice  as  to  marriage — Visit  to  M,  Sou- 
\y  lacroix — Competitive  examination  in  Paris-^^nexpected  triumph — 
Offered  the  position  of  Assistant  Professor  of  Foreign  Literature  in  the 
Sorbonne — Undertakes  a  short  tour  in  Germany — Aix-la-Chapelle — 
Cologne — Christian  art — Legends  of  the  Rhine — Asks  the  hand  of. 
Mademoiselle  Soulacroix,  and  is  accepted — Offered  the  Chair  of  Foreign 
Literature  in  the  University  of  Lyons — Deliverance  from  the  dilemma — 
resolution  to  go  to  Paris — His^parriage — letters  connected  with  it — His 
lofty  idea  of  the  duties  aiid  privileges  of  the  married  state— Tour  through 
Italy,  Sicily,  Naples,  Rome— St.  Peter's, •-« 

CHAPTER  XV.— 1842. 

Ozanam's  new  post  one  beset  with  difficulties — His  fitness  for  it,  notwith- 
standing—MM.  Guizot,  Villemain,  and  Cousin— M,  de  Montalembert— 
Ozanam  comes  boldly  out  as  a  teacher  identified  with  the  Christian 
faith— His  eloquence— Gifts  and  difficulties  as  an  orator— His  manner 
of  lecturing— Power  over  the  young,  and  strong  sympathy  with  them — 
Earnestness  in  his  professorial  duties— Lectures  on  the  Holy  Roman 
Empire— Research  for  his  work  on  Germany— Advice  to  his  brother 
Charles — His  love  of  work, ^47 

CHAPTER  XVI.~i 843-44. 

Question  of  the  freedom  of  the  schools— Montalembert — The  Cercle  Catho- 
lique — Ozanam's  influence  at  the  C^rc/^— speech  on  the  literary  duties 
of  Christians— Fierce  attack  by  the  Univers  on  a  portion  of  the  speech 
— His  prudence  and  far-seeing  sagacity  exemplified  at  this  juncture-^. 
Relations  between  Church  and  State  the  grand  question  at  issue — Oza- 
nam bravely  seconded  by  M.  Lenormant — Account  of  Lenormant's  con- 
version to  Christianity— Tumult  at  the  recommencement  of  his  lectures 


Cou  tents.  vii 


PAGE 

stilled  by  Ozanam— Lenormant's  Cours  closed  by  Government — Oza- 
nam,  undaunted,  continues  the  out-and-out  Christian  tone  of  his  teach- 
ing  His  universal  popularity — His  tolerance  towards  error — Anecdote 

illustrative  of  the  charity  which  distinguished  all  his  dealings  with  the 
poor — His  considerateness  and  deference  in  his  service  of  the  poor — 
True  character  of  almsgiving — His  order  in  dispensing  his  chcirities,      .  162 

CHAPTER   XVII.— 1844-45. 

O^anam's  household  in  Paris — Gui-gui— Important  event  for  Ozanam — M. 
Fauriel's  death — Nominated  Professor  for  life — Letters  on  this  subject  to 
Ampere  and  Foisset — Regret  of  the  pupils  of  the  College  Stanislas  at 
losing  him — their  letter  to  Ozanam — His  conscientiousness  as  an  ex- 
aminer— Nomination  of  his  father-in-law,  AL  Soulacroix,  as  Chef  de 
Division  in  the  Ministry  of  Public  Instruction— Birth  of  his  child— Joys 
and  duties  of  fatherhood — Summer  residence  at  Nogent — His  History 
of  Christian  Civilization  amongst  the  Germans^ !&? 

CHAPTER   XVIII.— 1846. 

Health  giving  way,  but  work  uninterrupted — Lectures  to  working-men — 
The  laborer  rehabilitated  by  Christianity— The  law  of  labor  universal — 
Labor  in  the  Church — Labor  the  law  of  regeneration — Examinations  for 
the  Baccalaureat — Ozanam  attacked  by  a  malignant  fever — Sent  on  a 
literary  mission  to  Italy, iS3 

CHAPTER   XIX.— 1846-47. 

Winter  in  Rome — Two  volumes  the  result  of  his  present  journey — Pius 
IX.  at  the  Church  of  St.  Apollinarius — Ozanam's  enthusiasm  for  the 
Pope — Easter  Sunday  at  St.  Peter's — Enthusicism  of  the  Romans — Por- 
trait of  Pius  IX. — Private  audience  with  the  Pope — Little  Marie — Re- 
searches in  the  library  at  the  Abbey  of  Monte  Cassino — National  banquet 
in  Rome — Torchlight  procession  to  the  Quirinal — Dreaming  in  the  star- 
light— Ozanam's  idea  of  Democracy — Real  and  ideal  Republic — Policy 
of  Pius  IX. — Principle  of  religion  and  liberty — Ozanam's  hopeful  view 
of  the  Pope's  reforms — The  amount  of  liberty  enjoyed  without  prejudice 
to  order,  the  measure  of  a  nation's  moral  strength — Tour  homewards — 
Siena,  Bologna,  Padua,  Assisi,  Venice — Attractions  of  Venice — Home 
with  restored  health— through  Switzerland  and  Belgium,        .        .        .193 

CHAPTER    XX.— 1847. 

Ozanam's  work,  Les  Poetes  Franciscains,  the  fruit  of  this  journey  to  Italy 
— St.  Gregory  and  St.  Ambrose — St.  Francis  of  Assisi — *'  My  Ladye 
Poverty" — "Our  brother,  my  lord  the  Sun" — Tomb  of  St.  Francis — 
Cimabue,  Giotto — Frere  Pacifique,  St.  Bonaventure — Jacopone  di  Todi, 
the  herald  of  Dante— .^////#  Flowers  of  St.  Francis,        .        .        .        .  aio 


viii  Contenh. 


CHAPTER    XXL— 1848. 


PAGE 


Elaborate  prolamine  of  Ozanam's  great  work — Revolution  of  February 
— Ozanam's  manner  of  judging  politics — Attacked  by  the  press — the 
camp  of  monarchs — Louis  Quatorze — "  Passons  aux  Barbares  !  " — Oza- 
nam's estimate  of  the  revolution — Declines  becoming  a  candidate  for 
election  to  the  Assemblee  Nationale — He  enters  the  lists  as  a  journalist,  223 

CHAPTER    XXH.— 1848-49. 

The  Avenir — Retrospect  of  Catholic  journalism — Abbe  Migne  and  the 
Univers — Abbe  Gerbet — The  Ere  Nouvelle  started  by  Ozanam  and  the 
Pere  Lacordaire — Election  of  Lacordaire  to  the  National  Assembly — 
Ozanam's  zeal  in  propagating  Christian  democratic  principles — Extracts 
from  the  Ere  Nouvelle — Ozanam's  courage  in  this  national  crisis — On 
duty  as  a  National  Guard — The  Archbishop  of  Paris,  at  the  request  of 
Ozanam,  M.  Bailly,  and  M,  Cornudet,  goes  forth  as  peace-maker — The 
Archbishop  killed  at  the  barricades — Ozanam's  disappointment  at  the 
results  of  the  Revolution — His  extraordinary  activity  at  this  time — State 
of  Paris  after  the  Revolution — Picture  of  misery  in  the  Faubourgs — Oza- 
nam's crusade  against  the  gospel  of  despair — Radical  causes  of  the  evil  ' 
sought  to  be  discovered — Apathy  of  the  Government — The  Ere  Nou-.-  ;  -  - 
velle^s  career  closed — Letter  to  a  Freethinker — A  new  paper  started — 
the  Mojiiieur  Reiigieux — Ozanam  promises  occasional  assistance — Con- 
troversy with  the  Univers — Denounced  as  a  deserter — Bears  witness  to 
himself 231 

CHAPTER    XXni.— 1850-51. 

Ozanam's  health  again  a  cause  of  serious  alarm — Tour  in  Brittany — the 
Bretons — the  pardon  of  St.  Anne  d'Auray — Legends  of  Brittany — The 
interests  of  the  poor — Morlaix — Hospitality — political  feeling — Comic 
incidents — Burlesque  poem  addressed  to  M.  Ampere — Political  decom- 

position  of  society — State  proselytism — Pere^  Lacordaire — Country  rest- %^Jj  y 

dence  at  Sceaux,  near  Paris — Friendship  with  Ampere — Faithful  and 
tender  letter  to  him,  and  the  response  it  met  with — Visit  to  London — 
the  Crystal  Palace — The  true  greatness  of  London — Its  wealth  and  its 
pauperism — St.  Paul's — Incident  connected  with  his  first  visit  to  West- 
minster Abbey — Catholicism  in  England — Class  feeling — Visit  to  Ox- 
ford— Return  to  Sceaux — Letter  to  Ampere — pleasant  prospects,    .        .  255 

CHAPTER    XXIV.— 1852. 

Ozanam  again  dangerously  ill — Letter  to  an  old  schoolfellow  whose  faith 
had  been  shipwrecked  in  the  study  of  profane  science — Leaves  from  his   ' 
own  experience — Conquests  of  the  Gospel — Last  appearance  at  the  Sor- 
bonne — Removal  to  Eaux-Bonnes  for  the  benefit  of  the  waters — Founds 
a  Conference  there — Intercourse  with  the  Abbe  Perreyve — Leaves  Eaux- 


Contents  IX 


FAOE 

Bonnes  for  BiauriU — Tour  in  the  Pyrenees — Pilgrimage  to  B«tharram,  a 
shrine  of  the  fifteenth  century — Parting  with  Perreyve — Proposed  as  a 
member  for  the  Institut — Stolen  glimpse  of  Spain — A  few  days  at  Bur- 
gos— Souvenir  of  this  rapid  excursion  :  A  Pilgrimage  to  the  Land  of 
t/ie  Cid — Burgos  under  three  separate  aspects — Farewell  to  Sfkain — 
jxjetic  invocation  to  Notre  Dame  de  Burgos — Pilgrimage  to  Notre 
Dame  de  Buglosse — St.  Vincent's  oak-tree — The  old  priest  at  Buglosse, 
and  his  advice — Threatening  symptoms  reappear, aya 

CHAPTER  XXV. 

Ozanam's  early-formed  plan  never  lost  sight  of  throughout  his  literary  and 
professional  career — His  reluctance  to  allow  his  lectures  at  the  Sorbonne 
to  be  reported  at  last  overcome — success  of  the  experiment — The  post- 
humous volumes  on  the  Civilisation  au  Cinquilme  Slide — His  literary 
testament,  being  the  preface  to  that  wck— The  Middle  Ages— Gibbon's 
thesis — How  viewed  by  Ozanam — Good  Friday,  a.  d.  1300— Paganism  of 
the  Roman  Empire— Slavery— The  poor— Fall  of  the  Empire— St. 
Augustine — Change  effected  by  Christianity  on  the  social  position  of 
woman — The  Latin  tongue  saved  by  Christianity — the  Vulgate — The 
bridge  between  antiquity  and  barbarism  bridged  over  by  Ozanam — Ora- 
nam's  Civilization  0/  the  Fifth  Century  crowned  at  the  Acad^mie  Fran- 
(jaise — Programme  of  the  course  of  his  whole  work — Les  Etudes  Ger- 
vianiques — Radical  unity  of  the  Indo-European  peoples — Conflict  be- 
tween the  Germans  and  the  Romans — The  mission  of  the  Franks — 
Charlemagne — The  mission  of  the  Celtic  race — Ireland  :  St.  Columba, 
St.  Brendan,  St.  Patrick — Lacordaire  on  Ozanam's  power  of  oratory 
and  erudition — Letter  from  Count  de  Montalembert  to  Madame  Oza- 
nam— Dante  et  la  Philosophie  Catholique  au  treiziime  siicle — The  dif- 
ferent schools  of  Dantesque  commentators — Ozanam's  chief  aim  in  his 
work  on  Dante— Philosophy  of  the  Middle  Ages— Secret  of  Dante's  im- 
mortality— Ozanam's  treatment  of  Beatrice  —  Multiform  character  of 
Dante's  poem— Dante  and  Beatrice — Turning-points  in  Dante's  life — 
Earlier  works — The  Divina  Commedia—Dainie  claimed  by  Ozanam  as 
the  prophet  of  democracy  and  of  the  revolutions  of  modem  society — 
Exonerated  from  complicity  in  modem  excesses — The  question  of  Dante's 
orthodoxy  —  His  invectives  against  the  Roman  court  and  certain  Popes 
— Summoned  before  the  Inquisition — Homer  and  Dante — Dante's  phil- 
osophy ever  the  obedient  handmaiden  of  theology — Ozanam's  work  and 
fts  characteristics, 


CHAPTER  XXVI.— 1853. 

Threshold  of  the  closing  scene — Journey  to  Italy — his  admiration  of  the 
wort:s  of  God — Cathedral  of  Pisa— The  library— Pleasure  in  his  friends 
— Lenormant — Ampere — Multiplication  of  Conferences  of  the  Society  of 
St,  Vincent  de  Paul  in  Italy — Guido  P«dagi — Pisa  and  Genoa — aspect  of 


y^Q 


Contents. 


PAGS 

the  churches— Protestant  efforts— Fourierism  and  Socialism — Incident 
in  connection  with  the  foundation  of  Conferences  in  Tuscany — Dowager 
Grand-Duchess — His  speech  at  the  opening  seance — Effect  produced  by 
its  circulation — State  of  health  at  this  time — His  daily  thanksgivings  for 
particular  mercies — "  Little  kindnesses  "  received  from  God — Letter  to 
Ampere— His  delight  in  prayer  and  meditation  on  Divine  things,  and  in 
the  reading  of  the  Scriptures— Thoughts  written  on  his  last  birthday — 
The  Marquis  de  Salvo — Madame  Recamier— Jewish  convert  to  Chris- 
tianity— Improvement  of  health — old  passion  for  work — Visit  to  Siena 
with  a  view  to  establish  a  Conference — Removal  to  Antignano — Letter 
to  Padre  Pendola,  earnestly  pleading  with  him  to  take  the  matter  in 
hand  —  His  success — two  Conferences  founded  —  Sympathy  with  do- 
mestic joys — Review  of  the  Poetes  Franciscains  in  the  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes — His  candidature  for  the  Institut  abandoned— His  "Odyssey" 
— increasing  weakness — Flattering  tokens  received  from  the  highest  per- 
sonages during  his  stay  in  Tuscany — Visitors  :  the  Ferruccis — ^brothers 
of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul— Goes  to  hear  Mass— homage  of  the  villagers — 
The  old  Cure  of  Antignano— Codicil  to  his  will— Letter  of  the  Abbe 
Perreyve — Last  days  at  Antignano — Removal  to  Marseilles — The  clos- 
ing scene, • 3^9 


PREFACE. 


The  following  passages  from  a  Review  of  the  first  edition  of 
this  Biography  of  Frederic  Ozanara  is  the  best  preface  I  can 
give,  at  the  request  of  the  writer,  to  the  second  edition  of  this 
deeply  intejresting  narrative. 

HENRY  EDWARD, 

Au£.  IS,  1878.  Cardinal  Archbishop  of  Westminster, 


P6re  Gratry  has  said  somewhere  in  his  writings  that  one  dif- 
ference between  the  society  of  the  Middle  Ages  and  of  these  lat- 
ter centuries  consists  in  this,  "  Society  then  was  Catholic,  and 
sustained  men  above  themselves,  but  now  Society  is  Catholic  no 
longer,  and  drags  men  downwards  with  itself."  The  truth  of  this 
is  to  be  seen  perhaps  more  clearly  in  France  and  in  this  century 
than  in  any  other  period  or  country.  The  first  French  Revolution 
decatholicized  the  society  of  France.  Its  Catholicism  has  sur- 
vived in  individuals,  and  yet  they  have,  with  exceptions  indeed, 
shown  the  depressing  and  distorting  power  of  the  society  into 
which  they  were  born,  and  by  which  they  were  nurtured.  What 
the  Germans  call  the  "  Time-Spirit  "  is  powerful  everywhere,  but 
it  has  shown  its  subtlety  and  its  supremacy  nowhere  more  visibly 
than  in  the  noble  and  chivalrous  race  of  Catholics  who  have  so 
powerfully  urged  onward  the  reaction  towards  faith  in  France 
since  the  year  1830. 

M.  de  Broglie  has  said  that  the  principles  of  1789  were  formu- 
lated and  published  not  only  as  a  charter  for  France  but  as  a  gos- 
pel for  mankind.  M.  Thiers  said  to  a  bishop  on  his  way  to  the 
Council,  *'  Do  not  attack  the  principles  of  1789;  whoso  touches 
them  touches  the  marrow  of  Frenchmen."  They  have  penetrated 
into  the  intelligence  and  created  a  public  opinion  which  affects 
even  those  who  resist  them.  To  this  fact  we  may  ascribe  two 
phenomena  strange  and  sad  in  the  Catholic  action  of  France 
for  the  last  forty  years;  namely,  that  those  who  were  labor* 


xii  Preface, 

ing  in  the  Catholic  reaction  to  restore  faith,  piety,  and  fidelity 
to  the  Holy  See,  were  divided,  and  opposed  to  each  other,  and 
that  one  band  of  men  for  whose  devotion,  piety,  intellectual  ele- 
vation, and  chivalrous  fidelity  to  the  Catholic  Church,  every 
Catholic  must  have  admiration,  should  have  been  so  perceptibly, 
though,  we  believe,  unconsciously,  affected  by  the  Time-Spirit 
created  by  the  principles  of  1789. 

Frederic  Ozanam  was  one  of  the  most  brilliant  of  the  brilliant 
band  of  Catholic  writers  in  whom  this  can  be  traced.  We  are, 
therefore,  desirous  of  making  unmistakably  clear  our  judgment 
on  these  points  before  we  go  on  to  express  our  profound  admira- 
tion and  affectionate  sympathy  with  him  and  many  of  those  who 
were  associated  with  him  in  this  noble  conflict  for  the  Catholic 
Faith  against  the  infidel  politics  and  Voltairean  society  of  Paris 
and  of  France. 

The  youth  of  France  were  the  offspring  of  the  infidel  Univer- 
sity of  the  First  Napoleon.  Neither  under  the  Restoration  nor 
under  the  reign  of  Louis  Philippe  was  its  destructive  influence 
counteracted.  Society  was  either  infidel  and  indifferent,  or  Vol- 
tairean— that  is,  infidel  and  scoffing.  Such  a  society  pulled  down 
all  its  members  ;  and  into  such  a  society  Frederic  Ozanam  was 
born.  It  might  be  divided  into  three  classes.  First  came  the 
non-Catholics,  who  believed  nothing  ;  secondly,  the  Catholics 
who  gave  splendid  examples  of  a  perfect  fidelity  to  the  Church  ; 
and,  thirdly,  those  who  may  be  called  Catholics  juxta  tnodum  ; 
that  is  to  say,  they  were  in  some  particulars  and  details  affected  by 
the  Time-Spirit  of  their  age  and  country.  Nevertheless,  among 
these  were  some  of  the  noblest  and  most  chivalrous  sons  of  the 
Church,  and  some  also  of  the  most  ardent  and  loving  Christians 
and  true  soldiers  of  Jesus  Christ.  It  seems  to  us  that  we  ought 
to  render  justice  to  all  such  men,  and  we  feel  that  we  can  do  so 
without  incurring  a  suspicion  of  our  being  "liberal  Catholics." 
We  have  had  our  baptismus  opprobriorum  as  Ultramontanes,  and 
even  as  ultra-Catholic  and  ultra-ultramontane.  Our  chief  mission 
has  been  to  learn  of  the  living  voice  of  the  Vicar  of  Jesus  Christ,  and 
to  repeat  his  utterances  with  a  perfect  fidelity.  We  therefore  claim 
to  ourselves  the  freedom  of  speaking  generously  of  those  who, 
in  our  judgment,  may  not  in  some  things  have  followed  the  guid- 
ance of  the  Holy  See,  for  we  have  bought  that  freedom  with  the 
great  price  of  no  little  odium,  and  no  sparing  censure  for  our 
extreme  ultramontanism. 

It  seems  to  us  to  be  the  duty  of  justice,  not  to  speak  of  charity, 


Preface,  xill 

that  while  we  remain  inflexible  in  our  own  attitude,  we  should  en- 
deavor, as  lar  as  possible,  lo  appreciate  at  its  full  all  that  is  high, 
noble,  truthful,  and  Catholic  in  them  ;  and  while  we  note  the 
point  in  which  we  believe  them  to  have  come  short,  to  render  to 
their  lives,  characters,  and  memories  the  fullest  recollection  of 
what  they  were.  We  say  iheir  memories,  because  of  those  of 
whom  we  have  to  speak  hardly  one  survives. 

Between  the  years  1830  and  1850  there  arosj  in  France  a  group 
of  men  whose  lives  have  left  an  indelible  mark  upon  their  country. 
The  period  of  De  Maistre  and  Chateaubriand  was  followed  by 
that  of  Lamennais,  De  Bonald,  De  Salignis,  Gerbet,  Lacordaire, 
Montalembert,  Ozanam,  Rio,  Combalot,  Cociiin,  and  in  its  later 
time,  Gratry ;  and,  we  must  add,  as  a  youthful  disciple  called 
away  before  he  had  inscribed  his  name  by  toil,  Henry  Perreyve. 

While  conscious  of  divergencies  and  deviations  in  certain 
things,  it  was  impossible  not  to  see  and  to  love  the  noble  charac- 
ter of  these  men.  Endowed  with  great  natural  gifts,  and  with 
wide  and  various  cultivation,  there  was  one  thing  in  common  with 
them  all — a  great  mental  beauty,  and  a  great  breadth  of  heart. 
No  one  can  have  read  the  writings  of  Gerbet,  Rio,  Ozanam, 
Montalembert,  and  Gratry,  nobody  can  have  known  Henry  Per- 
reyve, without  seeing  and  feeling  the  singular  beauty  of  their  in- 
telligence, and  the  generous  impulses  of  their  character. 

We  have  no  fear  in  rendering  this  just  and  afiectionate  tribute  to 
their  memory;  and  if  in  anything  we  have  at  times  strongly  op- 
posed their  way  of  judging  and  speaking,  we  never  forgot,  and 
never  shall  cease  to  declare,  that  they  were  noble  sons  of  France, 
which  had  marked  them  for  its  own  with  some  of  the  best  tokens 
of  its  less  stable  age.  There  is  also  another  truth  to  be  born  in 
mind.  If  we  were  to  try  the  language  of  some  of  the  Antcnicene 
Fathers  by  the  terminology  fixed  by  the  Council  of  Nicaea,  we 
should  find  matter  for  criticism.  In  like  manner  if  we  were  to 
try  the  writings  of  some  of  the  noblest  and  most  fervent  de- 
fenders of  the  Catholic  Faith  and  of  the  Holy  See  in  France  by 
the  later  tests  of  the  Syllabus  and  of  the  Vatican  Council,  we 
should  commit  an  injustice.  At  that  period  we  might  have  been 
as  they  were,  without  an  exact  terminology,  and  with  questions 
as  yet  undecided.  • 

Ozanam's  studies  were  completed  by  the  age  of  twenty-two  ; 
and  in  eighteen  years  he  accomplished  all  that  he  has  left  behind 
of  finished  writings,  and  all  that  he  wrought  into  the  hearts  and 
lives  of  the  youth  of  France  in  the  widespread   revival  of  Faith, 


xiv  Preface. 

which  is  expanding  to  this  day.  They  were  eighteen  years  of 
great  intellectual  and  spiritual  intensity.  One  word  spoken  by 
a  mind  raised  to  the  pitch  of  its  powers  does  more  than  a  thou- 
sand scattered  from  an  unimpassioned  mind.  We  have  rarely 
seen  clearer  evidence  of  mental  intensity  than  in  Frederic  Oza- 
nam.  It  may  be  well  believed  that  it  was  not  only  the  energy  of 
a  mind  inflamed  with  the  love  of  God,  but  that  the  keen  energy  of 
a  nervous  system  which  daily  consumed  itself  added  to  the  inten- 
sity of  the  will.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  accomplished  the 
vow  of  his  youth  by  spending  and  being  spent  to  the  last  beat  of 
his  pulse  for  "  the  Truth  which  had  given  him  peace." 

Although  Ozanam  chose  literature  for  his  calling  in  life,  and 
although  he  refused  again  and  again  the  proposal  to  enter  the 
Legislature,  or  to  be  called  a  politician,  and  that,  too,  with  a  de- 
clared purpose  of  working  out  social  reforms  in  distinction  from 
political,  nevertheless  he  avowed  himself  explicitly  to  be  a  repub- 
lican. This  we  have  no  doubt  has  caused  him  to  incur  the  cen- 
sure of  Legitimists,  Royalists,  Imperialists,  and  even  to  lose  the 
perfect  confidence  of  loyal  Catholics,  who  associate  order  and 
obedience  with  monarchy,  and,  if  not  anarchy,  at  least  instability 
of  both  public  and  private  morals  with  republicanism.  This  was 
especially  true  in  France,  where  the  name  of  Republic  and  the 
reality  were  identified  with  1793  and  the  Phrygian  cap  of  re- 
volution. We  shall  not  be  suspected  of  republicanism,  or  want 
of  loyalty  to  the  great  English  monarchy  of  a  thousand  years, 
founded  broad  and  deep  in  the  natural  order  of  prudence  and 
justice  by  our  Catholic  forefathers,  and  subsisting  to  this  day,  the 
only  commonwealth  against  which  revolutions  have  broken  them- 
selves in  vain, — we  say  we  shall  not  be  suspected  of  republican- 
ism, or  of  any  uncatholic  tendency  in  politics,  if  we  clear  Frede- 
ric Ozanam  also  from  any  such  suspicion. 

We  have  heard  it  said  that  no  republican  can  be  a  good  Catho- 
lic. We  would  commend  this  dictum  to  the  conscience  of  Cardi- 
nal McCloskey  and  to  the  pastors  and  people  of  the  Catholic 
Church  of  the  United  States  ;  or,  to  come  nearer  home,  we  would 
commend  it  to  the  deliberation  of  Mgr.  Mermillod,  who  would, 
we  imagine,  distinguish  between  the  Helvetian  republic  and  the 
gang  of  infidels  and  persecutors  who  now  tyrannize  over  Geneva. 
But  we  may  even  go  further,  and  remind  those  who  censure  Oza- 
nam's  politics,  of  the  republics  of  Venice,  Florence,  Pisa,  and 
Genoa,  of  the  Catholic  chivalry  which  issued  from  them,  and  of 
the  Saints  who  sprung  from  them. 


Preface.  xv 

Now,  it  was  precisely  the  mediaeval  Christian  and  Catholic  re- 
public which  fascinated  and  filled  Ozanam's  mind.  In  it  he  saw 
the  check  and  balance  which  would  have  saved  France  from  the 
excesses  of  its  later  kings,  and,  therefore,  from  the  sanguinary 
and  anarchical  reaction  called  the  Revolution.  His  indignant 
lamentations  over  the  state  of  the  people  of  Paris  ;  his  burning 
zeal  for  the  poor,  whose  degradation  in  poverty,  ignorance,  and 
depravity  he,  as  a  Brother  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  saw  with  his 
own  eyes,  and  relieved  with  his  own  hands — all  this  made  him 
pray  and  toil  for  a  Christian  equality  of  brotherhood  such  as  he 
had  read  of  in  the  commonwealth  of  Israel.  Perhaps  the  instinct 
of  a  theocratic  commonwealth  ran  in  the  blood  of  a  Hozannam 
by  direct  inheritance. 

But  we  can  find  for  Ozanam  another  plea.  In  the  years  when 
he  was  entering  into  the  studies  of  his  manhood  there  appeared 
in  France  a  book  which  has,  more  than  almost  any  other,  mould- 
ed and  directed  the  political  thought  of  the  nineteenth  century ; 
wc  mean  De  Tocqueville's  "Democracy  in  America."*  We 
shall  better  convey  our  own  meaning  by  simply  letting  De  Tocque- 
ville  express  his.  In  his  Introduction  to  his  work  he  writes  as 
follows  : 

"  The  more  I  studied  American  society,  the  more  I  perceived  that  the  equality 
of  conditions  is  the  fundamental  fact  from  which  all  others  seem  to  be  derived,  and 
the  central  point  at  which  all  my  observations  constantly  terminated.  I  then 
turned  my  thoughts  to  our  own  hemisphere,  where  I  imagined  that  I  discerned 
something  analogous  to  the  spectacle  which  the  New  World  presented  to  me.  I 
observed  that  the  equality  of  conditions  b  daily  progressing  towards  those  extreme 
limits  which  it  seems  to  have  reached  in  the  United  States;  and  that  the  demo- 
cracy which  governs  the  American  communities  appears  to  be  rapidly  rising  into 
power  in  Europe."     (P.  13.) 

He  ascribes  this  equality  chiefly  to  the  action  of  the  Catholic 
Church  : 

"Soon  (he  says)  the  political  power  of  the  clergy  was  founded,  and  began  to 
exert  itself  ;  the  clergy  opened  its  ranks  to  all  classes — to  the  poor  and  to  the  rich, 
the  villain  and  the  lord  ;  equality  penetrated  into  the  government  through  the 
Church,  and  the  being  who,  as  a  serf,  must  have  vegetated  in  perpetual  bondage, 
took  his  place  as  a  priest  in  the  midst  of  nobles,  and  not  unfrequently  above  the 
heads  of  kings."     (P.  15.) 

After  saying  that  everj'  fifty  years  has  levelled  France  more  and 
more  nearly  after  the  model  of  America,  he  s^'S  : 

"  Nor  is  this  phenomenon  at  all  peculiar  to  France.    Whithersoever  we  turn  our 
♦  "  Democracy  in  America  "  :  Reeve's  translation.     London  :    1865. 


xvi  Preface. 

eyes,  we  shall  witness  the  same  continual  revolution  throughout  the  whole  of 
Christendom.  The  various  occurrences  of  national  existence  have  everywhere 
turned  to  the  advantage  of  democracy.  All  men  have  aided  it  by  their  exertions: 
those  who  have  intentionally  labored  in  its  cause,  and  those  who  have  served  it  un- 
wittingly ;  those  who  have  fought  for  it,  and  those  who  have  declared  themselves 
its  opponents — have  all  been  driven  along  in  the  same  track,  have  all  labored  to 
one  end,  some  ignorantly  and  some  unwillingly  ;  all  have  been  blind  instruments 
in  the  hands  of  God.  The  gradual  development  of  the  equality  of  conditions  is 
therefore  a  providential  fact,  and  it  possesses  all  the  characteristics  of  a  Divine 
decree :  it  is  universal,  it  is  durable,  it  constantly  eludes  all  human  interference 
and  all  events  as  well  as  all  men  contribute  to  its  progress."     (Pp.  ig,  20.) 

"  The  whole  book  which  is  here  offered  to  the  public  has  been  written  under  the 
impression  of  a  kind  of  religious  dread  produced  on  the  author's  mind  by  the  con- 
templation of  so  irresistible  a  revolution,  which  has  advanced  for  centuries  in  spite 
of  such  amazing  obstacles,  and  which  is  still  proceeding  in  the  midst  of  the  ruins  it 
has  made."    (P.  21.) 

"  The  Christian  nations  of  our  age  seem  to  me  to  present  a  most  alarming  spec- 
tacle ;  the  impulse  which  is  bearing  them  along  is  so  strong  that  it  cannot  be 
stopped,  but  it  is  not  yet  so  rapid  that  it  cannot  be  guided :  their  fate  is  in  their 
hands ;  yet  a  little  while  and  it  may  be  so  no  longer.  The  first  duty  which  is  at 
this  time  imposed  upon  those  who  direct  our  affairs  is  to  educate  the  democracy : 
to  warm  its  faith,  if  that  be  possible  ;  to  purify  its  morals  ;  to  direct  its  energies  ; 
to  substitute  a  knowledge  of  business  for  its  inexperience,  and  an  acquaintance 
with  its  true  interests  for  its  blind  propensities  ;  to  adapt  its  government  to  time 
and  place,  and  to  modify  it  in  compliance  with  the  occurrences  and  the  actors  of 
the  age.     A  new  science  of  politics  is  indispensable  to  a  new  world."     (P.  22,) 

"  Zealous  Christians  may  be  found  amongst  us,  whose  minds  are  nurtured  in  the 
love  and  knowledge  of  a  future  life,  and  who  readily  espouse  the  cause  of  human 
liberty,  as  the  source  of  all  moral  greatness.  Christianity,  which  has  declared  that 
all  men  are  equal  in  the  sight  of  God,  will  not  refuse  to  acknowledge  that  all  citi- 
zens are  equal  in  the  sight  of  the  law.  But,  by  a  singular  concourse  of  events,  re- 
ligion is  entangled  in  those  institutions  which  democracy  assails,  and  it  is  not  un' 
frequently  brought  to  reject  the  equality  it  loves,  and  to  curse  that  cause  of  liberty 
as  a  foe,  which  it  might  hallow  by  its  alliance."    (Pp.  31,  32.) 

He  then  sums  up  the  saddest  feature  of  our  times — the  unna- 
tural and  fratricidal  conflicts  of  those  who  have  common  interests, 
and  are  combining  for  the  same  ends.  It  is  as  if  At6  had  come 
between  men. 

"  The  religionists  are  the  enemies  of  liberty,  and  the  friends  of  liberty  attack  re- 
ligion ;  the  high-minded  and  the  noble  advocate  subjection,  and  the  meanest  and 
most  servile  minds  preach  independence;  honest  and  enlightened  citizens  are  op- 
posed to  all  progress,  whilst  men  without  patriotism  and  without  principles  are  the 
apostles  of  civilization  and  of  intelligence."     (Pp.  33,  34.) 

We  cannot  leave  De  Tocqueville's  name  without  adding  that 
he  was  born  of  a  fervent  Catholic  Breton  family  ;  that,  like  too 
many  Frenchmen,  he  became  practically  indifferent  ;  but  that  he 
ended  his  days  in  Cannes  with  the  pastoral  care  of  the  cur6  and 
the  watchful  service  of  a  Sister  of  Charity. 


Preface.  xvll 

Now,  we  can  hardly  believe  that  Ozanam  had  not  become  fa- 
miliar with  De  Tocqueville's  thesis,  and  we  might  venture  to  as- 
sert with  De  Tocqueville's  writings.  If  so,  we  have  the  key  to 
the  passages  which  we  now  add,  in  which  Ozanam  pours  out  his 
whole  political  creed. 

His  biographer,  who  evidently  has  studied  all  his  works,  has 
summed  up  his  mind  as  follows  : 

"  The  philosophy  of  history,  as  he  interpreted  it,  had  led  him  to  beUeve  that 
there  is  no  real  meaning  or  character  in  the  movement  of  human  society  unless 
through  all  its  changes  and  convulsions  we  can  discern  a  steady  and  continual  pro- 
gress through  Christianity  to  the  dignity  of  freedom.  This  condition  of  freedom, 
which  he  held  as  essential  to  the  welfare  and  happiness  of  communities,  he  consid- 
ered equally  indispensable  to  the  Church.  He  was  consequently  intolerant  of  the 
least  bondage  for  her,  and  impatient  that  a  Christian  people  should  tolerate  it, 
when  at  the  same  time  they  were,  perhaps,  fighting  manfully  for  the  emancipation 
of  their  country.  If  the  Church  were  free,  free  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word- 
free  to  guide,  to  rule,  and  to  teach  mankind — then  all  legitimate  freedom  would 
follow."     (Pp.  283.) 

"  '  A  struggle  is  preparing,'  he  says, '  between  the  classes,  and  it  threatens  to  be 
terrible ;  let  us  precipitate  ourselves  between  these  hostile  ranks  so  as  to  deaden 
the  shock,  if  we  cannot  prevent  it.'  In  1836  he  wrote  to  his  friend  Lallier :  '  The 
question  which  agitates  the  world  to-day  is  not  a  question  of  political  formsy  but 
a  social  question  ;  if  it  be  the  struggle  of  those  who  have  nothing,  with  those  who 
have  too  much  ;  if  it  be  the  violent  shock  of  opulence  and  poverty  which  is  mak- 
ing the  ground  tremble  under  our  feet,  our  duty,  as  Christians,  is  to  throw  our- 
selves between  these  irreconcilable  enemies,  and  to  induce  one  side  to  give,  in 
order  to  fulfil  the  law,  and  the  other  to  receive,  as  a  benefit ;  to  make  one  side 
cease  to  exact,  and  the  other  to  refuse  ;  to  render  equality  as  general  as  it  is  possi- 
ble amongst  men  ;  to  make  voluntary  community  of  possession  to  replace  taxation 
and  forced  loans  ;  to  make  charity  accomplish  what  justice  and  law  alone  can  never 
do.'  He  adhered  to  this  political  creed  all  his  life.  Twelve  years  later,  on  the  eve 
of  the  '  violent  shock'  which  his  far-seeing  sagacity  foretold,  he  repeats,  as  in  his 
student  days,  *  It  is  a  social  question  ;  do  away  with  misery.  Christianize  the  peo- 
ple, and  you  will  make  an  end  of  revolutions.'  "     (Pp.  304.) 

**  The  first  duty  of  Christians,  now,  is  not  to  be  frightened  ;  and  the  second  is 
not  to  frighten  others ;  but,  on  the  contrary,  to  reassure  the  timorous,  and  to 
make  them  understand  that  the  present  crisis  is  like  a  storm  that  cannot  last." 
(P.  318.) 

"  Here  we  are  in  this  great  and  opulent  metropolis  for  the  last  seven  weeks  with- 
out a  government  or  a  regular  police,  and  yet  we  hear  of  no  more  murders,  robber- 
ies, or  other  misdemeanors  than  before.  Don't  believe  those  evil-minded  persons 
who  go  about  spreading  absurd  stories  ;  there  is  not  a  word  of  truth  in  them,  and 
nothing  is  more  contrary  to  the  dispositions  of  the  population  of  Paris,  who  on 
every  occasion  seek  to  show  resp&ct  to  religion  and  sympathy  to  the  clergy.  My 
friend,  the  Ahbfe  Cherruel,  who  has  blessed  thirteen  trees  of  liberty,  has  been  quite 
affected  by  the  proofs  of  faith  which  he  found  amidst  this  people,  where,  since 
1815,  the  priest  has  been  taught  to  see  only  enemies  of  God  and  of  the  Church. 
Occupy  yourself  as  much  with  servants  as  with  masters,  with  workmen  as  much  as 
vith  employers.     This  is  henceforth  the  only  means  of  salvation  for  the  Church  of 


T-viii  Preface. 

France.  The  cur^iS  must  set  aside  their  pious  parish  congregations,  little  flocks  of 
good  sheep  in  the  midst  of  an  enormous  population  to  whom  the  parish  priest  is  a 
stranger.  He  must  henceforth  occupy  himself,  not  only  with  the  indigent,  but 
with  that  immense  class  of  poor  who  do  not  ask  for  alms,  but  who  are,  neverthe- 
less, attracted  by  social  preaching,  by  charitable  associations,  by  the  affection 
that  is  shown  to  them,  and  which  teaches  them  more  than  we  think.  Now,  more 
than  ever,  we  ought  to  meditate  on  a  beautiful  passage  in  the  2d  chapter  of  the 
Epistle  of  St.  James,  which  seems  as  if  it  had  been  written  expressly  for  these 
times."     (Pp.  319.) 

Once  more,  in  a  passage  which  we  reluctantly  abridge,  he 
brings  out  the  profound  conviction  of  his  mind  that  the  infidel 
revolution  is  the  ranting  and  malaria  of  a  land  where  the  "  salt 
has  lost  its  savor  "  : 

"  It  is  within,  not  without,  that  we  must  seek  for  the  sources  of  men's  happiness 
and  its  principal  enemies,"  he  declares  ;  "  and  we  shall  have  done  nothing,  abso- 
lutely nothing,  so  long  as  we  have  not  carried  light  and  reform  into  those  internal 
disorders  which  time  does  not  right,  which  are  more  incurable  than  diseases,  which 
Jast  longer  than  the  chomage^  and  go  on  multiplying  pauperism  long  after  the 
grass  of  the  graveyard  has  effaced  the  last  traces  of  civil  war.  God  did  not 
make  the  poor  ;  He  sends  no  human  creatures  into  the  chances  of  this  world  with- 
out providing  them  with  those  two  sources  of  riches,  which  are  the  fountain  of 
all  others — intelligence  and  will.  .  .  .  Why  should  we  hide  from  the  people 
what  they  know,  and  flatter  them  like  bad  kings?  It  is  human  liberty  that  makes 
the  poor;  it  is  that  which  dries  up  those  two  primitive  fountains  of  wealth,  by  al- 
lowing intelligence  to  be  quenched  in  ignorance,  and  will  to  be  weakened  by  mis- 
conduct. The  working-men  know  it  better  than  we  do.  .  .  .  God  forbid  that 
we  should  calumniate  the  poor  whom  the  Gospel  blesses,  or  render  the  suffering 
classes  responsible  for  their  misery  ;  thus  pandering  to  the  hardness  of  those  bad 
hearts  that  fancy  themselves  exonerated  from  helping  the  poor  man  when  they 
have  proved  his  wrong-doing.  .  .  .  But  while  we  have  put  crushing  taxes  on 
salt,  meat,  and  all  necessaries  of  life,  we  have  not  yet  discovered  in  the  arsenal  of 
our  fiscal  laws  the  secret  of  arresting  the  multiplication  of  distilleries,  of  raising  the 
price  of  alcoholic  liquors,  of  restricting  the  sale  of  those  detestable,  adulterated, 
poisonous  drinks  that  cause  more  sickness  than  all  the  rigors  of  the  seasons,  and 
make  more  criminals  than  all  the  injustice  of  men  combined.  What  reforptis  have 
you  introduced  into  the  public  amusements  of  this  Parisian  population,  so  infatu- 
ated about  pleasure,  so  ready  to  let  itself  be  led  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  not  with 
bread,  as  it  has  been  said,  but  with  amusement  ?  Last  winter  the  Prefecture  of 
Police  delivered  yi7«r  thousand  licenses  /or  night  balls.  The  State  puts  no  limit 
to  those  unhealthy  diversions,  which  the  good  sense  of  our  fathers  contracted  within 
the  six  weeks  of  the  Carnival.  Every  year  it  authorizes  the  opening  of  a  new  thea- 
tre in  some  wretched  haunt  of  the  Faubourgs,  where  the  sons  and  daughters  of  the 
people  are  fed  nightly  upon  the  scum  of  a  literature  whose  cynicism  would  revolt 
the  chastity  of  the  opera  pit.  And  when,  for  six  months  of  the  year,  the  youth  of 
the  working  classes  have  spent  their  evenings  and  their  nights  in  these  horrible 
dens,  where  their  health  runs  as  much  danger  as  their  morals,  you  are  surprised  to 
see  them  turn  out  miserable  puny  creatures,  incapable  of  supplying  the  military 
contingent,  but  supplying  innumerable  recruits  every  year  to  the  prisons  and  the 
hospitals  !  Let  us  not  imagine  we  have  done  our  duty  by  the  people  when  we  have 
taught  them  to  read,  and  write,  and  count-    ■     .    .    When  it  was  a  question  of 


Preface.  xix 

crushing  out  the  last  embers  of  the  insurrection,  there  was  no  need  of  delays  and 
formalities  to  pitch  twenty  camps  in  the  Boulevards  of  Paris,  and  up  to  the  very 
doors  of  the  Hotel  de  Ville  ;  and  here  we  are,  after  four  months,  when  in  the  12th 
arrondissement  alone  there  are  4,000  children  without  shelter — here  we  are  still 
struggling  amidst  adjournments,  motions,  and  debates,  fighting  to  overcome  I 
know  not  what  scruples  of  committees,  boards,  administrations,  and  the  rest  of  it, 
who  are  terrified  that  the  State  will  be  ruined  and  overturned  if  the  education  of 
the  young  ouvriers  is  confided  to  sisters  and  brothers,  to  teachers  capable,  that  is, 
of  teaching  them  something  more  than  how  to  spell  out  the  syllables  of  the  news- 
paper, and  to  scrawl  the  ordre  dej'our  of  the  barricades  on  the  walls  with  a  piece 
of  coal."     (Pp.  334-335.) 

"  '  The  poor  devils,'  he  said,  '  who  are  beguiled  to  the  barricades,  but  who  are 
Christians  at  heart,  are  ready  to  melt  at  a  word  of  kindness.' "    (P.  277.) 

In  all  this  we  see  a  profound  faith  in  the  words  of  the  Holy 
Scriptures.  **  Sanabiles  fecit  Deus  nationes  super  terras."  He 
believed  the  nations  to  be  sick  because  their  faith  had  almost  given 
way  under  the  spiritual,  moral,  and  physical  conditions  of  their 
life.  But  he  profoundly  believed  in  the  healing  power  of  God 
through  the  Church  and  the  ever-renewing  health  of  the  genera- 
tions of  man.  France,  it  is  said,  had  once  two-and-twenty  thou- 
sand leprosy  hospitals,  but  they  have  disappeared  together  with 
the  leprosy  which  called  them  into  existence.  So  he  believed 
that  the  social  evils  of  France  were  to  be  healed  by  the  power  of 
Christianity  upon  the  heart  of  man.  "  Christianize  the  masses"; 
this  was  his  gospel  and  his  political  creed — a  creed  which  has  a 
higher  sanction  from  St.  Gregory  the  Great  to  Pius  the  Ninth. 

And  the  mention  of  this  august  nanxe  reminds  us  that  we  can- 
not better  close  this  hearty  tribute  to  a  beautiful  mind  and  a  noble 
life  than  by  the  words  in  which  Ozanam  professed  his  filial 
and  loving  obedience  to  the  Vicar  of  Jesus  Christ.  The  winter 
of  1846-1847  Ozanam  passed  in  Rome.  It  was  at  the  beginning 
of  the  Pontificate  of  Pius  IX.    On  Easter  Sunday  he  wrote  thus: 

"  This  is  the  moment  to  speak  to  you  of  the  Papacy,  now  that  I  have  just  as- 
sisted at  its  most  solemn  pageants,  and  am  still  under  the  spell  of  the  emotion 
called  up  by  that  most  thrilling  specUcle  which  is  to  be  seen  on  earth,  the  Papal 
Mass  and  the  benediction  of  the  Urbi  et  orbi."    (P.  265.) 

Ozanam  was  received  by  the  Holy  Father  with  the  most  fatherly 
affection,  and  it  was  returned  by  a  filial  love  which  inspired  his 
whole  soul  with  the  loyalty  of  a  chivalrous  Catholic. 

At  a  public  meeting,  on  his  return  from  Rome,  he  said: 

"  I  believe  the  future  has  serious  troubles  in  store  for  Pius  IX.  I  believe  it  for 
his  greater  glory.  God  does  not  raise  up  such  men  for  ordinary  difficulties.  If  this 
great  Pontiff  had  only  to  cope  with  the  over-enthusiasm,  the  eagerness  of  his  peo- 
ple— a  thing  that  so  few  Drinces  have  to  complain  of— his  mission  would  be  an  easy 


XX  Preface. 

one  ;  it  would  fill  too  small  a  place  in  history  ;  his  bark  would  glide  over  tranquil 
waters.  We  must  look  out  for  the  tempest.  But  let  us  not  fear,  like  the  disciples 
of  little  faith  ;  Christ  is  in  the  boat,  and  He  is  not  sleeping  ;  never  has  He  been 
more  wakeful  than  in  these  present  days."     (P.  280.) 

Such  was  Frederic  Ozanam,  a  pure  and  noble  soul,  on  fire  with 
charity  to  all  men,  especially  to  the  poor  ;  consumed  by  zeal  in 
the  service  of  truth  ;  pious,  with  a  filial  tenderness  ;  exemplary 
in  every  path  of  life  ;  more  eloquent  in  the  supernatural  beauty 
of  his  thoughts  than  in  the  loving  words  which  fell  from  his  lips; 
more  illuminated  with  the  ardor  of  Christian  faith  than  with  the 
manifold  lights  of  literary  cultivation  :  such  a  man  bore  in  him  a 
Catholic  heart  full  of  all  instinctive  loyalty,  as  ready  to  give  his 
life  for  a  jot  or  tittle  of  the  faith,  or  for  a  definition  of  the  Divine 
authority  of  the  Church,  as  he  was  to  counsel  the  Archbishop  of 
Paris  to  tread  in  the  steps  of  the  good  Shepherd,  and  to  lay  down 
his  life  for  his  sheep.  May  God  raise  up  on  every  side  laymen 
like  Frederic  Ozanam  ! 

H.  E.,  C.  A, 


PREFACE 

TO  THK  PRESENT   EDITION 


Vincentians  and  Catholics  generally  of  this  and  other  English- 
speaking  communities,  particularly  such  as  are  interested  in  the 
history  and  development  of  Catholic  charitable  endeavors,  will 
be  much  gratified  to  learn  of  the  purpose  of  the  Christian  Press 
Association  to  issue  another  English  edition  of  the  life  and  works 
of  Frederic  Ozanam,  that  brilliant  Catholic  scholar,  that  true 
follower  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  that  great  exemplar  of  the 
zealous  Christian  charit>'-worker,  whose  entire  history  is  one 
continued  recital  of  beautiful  acts  of  self-sacrifice  and  benevolent 
deeds  entering  into  a  life  unselfishly  devoted  to  the  alleviation  of 
the  wants,  and  the  lessening  of  the  miseries  and  ills  of  the  poor, 
the  suffering  and  the  afflicted. 

How  few  comparatively  there  are  who  know  anything  of  the 
wonderful  work  performed  by  this  man  of  God !  The  histories 
and  biographies  of  noted  warriors  and  famous  statesmen  are 
usually  read  with  avidity  and  admiration.  It  is  universally  ad- 
mitted that  such  men  have  accomplished  good  and  that  the  world 
was  much  better  for  their  existence.  It  is  not  surprising,  there- 
fore, to  find  that,  in  the  perusal  of  the  histories  of  these  great 
characters,  there  sometimes  comes  stealing  o'er  us,  a  feeling  of 
pride  in  the  realization  of  the  fact  that  these  men  who  have  left 
their  impress  upon  the  pages  of  history  and  whose  deeds  of 
valor  and  renown  have  been  handed  down  from  generation  to 
generation  were,  after  all,  human  like  ourselves. 

Why  is  it  then,  that  so  few  take  interest  or  pleasure  in  pe- 
rusing the  histories  of  those  saintly  warriors,  those  God-fearing, 
God-loving  men  and  women  who  have  labored  zealously  for  the 
advancement  of  the  interests  of  the  poor,  the  down-trodden  and 
the  defenceless?  The  world  at  large  knows  perchance  a  little  of 
the  wonderful  works  accomplished  by  the  great  and  good  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul,  but  his  saintly  follower,  Frederic  Ozanam,  the 
founder  of  our  beloved  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  is  com- 

iii 


iv  Preface, 

paratively  unknown.  Yet,  in  charity  work,  these  saintly  men  have 
made  history,  and  the  methods  adopted  and  put  into  operation 
by  them  for  the  adequate  relief  of  the  poor  are  well-established 
principles,  recognized  and  followed  by  the  leading  charitable  or- 
ganizations of  the  present  day. 

In  this  age  of  enlightenment,  when  people  apparently  have 
gone  mad  over  the  question  of  modernized  charitable  or  philan- 
thropic methods,  is  it  not  a  matter  of  interest  to  Catholics  to 
know  that,  with  all  our  vaunted  and  much-heralded  progress, 
with  all  the  wonderful  advances  made  in  the  so-called  scientific 
charitable  field,  there  is  comparatively  little  of  lasting  value  em- 
ployed that  does  not  owe  its  origin  to  the  inspiration  of  that 
great  apostle  of  charity — St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  Moreover,  many, 
very  many  of  our  so-called  modern  methods  are  but  counterparts 
of  those  actually  used  centuries  ago  by  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  and 
his  disciples.  Seventy-eight  years  ago,  Ozanam,  patterning  his 
work  on  the  plans  outlined  by  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  organized  the 
Society  which  has  grown  to  such  large  proportions  that  to-day 
it  occupies  a  very  conspicuous  place  in  the  history  of  relief - 
giving  societies. 

Alexander  Johnson,  a  non-Catholic  charity- worker  of  national 
repute  and  for  many  years  Secretary  of  the  National  Conference 
of  Charities  and  Correction  of  the  United  States  of  America,  thus 
writes  of  Ozanam:  "The  name  of  Frederic  Ozanam  deserves 
a  high  place  in  the  list  of  benefactors  of  his  race,  and  the 
motives  which  animated  him  should  be  emulated  by  us  all  to-day, 
whether  we  are  Catholic  or  non-Catholic.  *  *  *  The  principles 
set  forth  more  than  seventy-five  years  ago  by  the  young  law 
student  in  Paris,  are  now  the  common  possession  of  the  civilized 
world.  Unfortunately,  we  know  them  better  than  we  practise 
them.  .  .  .  Ozanam  perceived  the  principle,  now  universally 
accepted  wherever  organized  charity  is  known,  that  you  do  not 
really  help  people  unless  you  help  them  to  be  better  men  and 
women.  Not  merely  the  bread  that  perishes,  but  the  alms  of 
counsel  and  good  advice,  was  to  be  given.  More  than  all  he 
taught  that  the  relation  between  giver  and  receiver  must  be  a 
personal  one,  that  we  cannot  discharge  our  duty  to  our  poor 
neighbor  by  a  gift  to  some  society-  or  institution,  good  and 
necessary  as  such  gifts  are,  but  that  we  must  visit  the  needy  in 
their  afflictions,  not  sending,  but  going." 

"  May  God  raise  up  on  every  side  laymen  like  Frederic  Oza- 


Preface.  v 

nam,"  was  the  beautiful  tribute,  penned  years  ago  by  the 
venerated  Cardinal  Manning  in  the  concluding  paragraph  of  his 
preface  to  the  first  edition  of  the  fascinating  and  soul-inspiring 
life  of  Ozanam.  Surely  does  the  Cardinal's  prayer  find  a  most 
responsive  echo  in  the  hearts  of  all  who  have  given  any  thought 
or  heed  to  present  day  conditions  of  charity  work. 

Never  was  the  time  more  opportune  or  appropriate  for  the 
promulgation  of  the  doctrines  taught  and  practised  by  Ozanam 
and  the  members  of  the  first  Conference  of  the  Society  of  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul.  Charity,  devoid  of  the  softening  influence  of 
religion,  is  cold  and  forbidding.  Unfortunately,  the  trend  of 
secularized  charity  work  in  the  United  States  to-day  seems  to  be 
drifting  away  from  religion  and  religious  influences.  With 
others,  who  have  spent  almost  a  lifetime  in  an  endeavor  to 
further  the  cause  of  Catholic  charity,  the  writer  often  has  ex- 
perienced the  pangs  of  sadness  when  compelled  to  realize  that, 
outside  of  the  Catholic  Church,  the  great  philanthropic  leaders 
who  are  working  mightily  for  the  social  uplift  of  the  people 
inject  very  little,  if  any,  religious  motives  into  their  work.  The 
recognition  of  this  absence  of  religion  in  social  work  becomes 
more  discouraging  when  one  pauses  to  consider  the  dreadful 
prospects  such  Godless  charity  unfolds.  Dispense  with  religious 
influences  in  your  treatment  of  the  ills  of  the  poor  and  you 
thereby  deprive  those  already  sorely-afflicted  unfortunates  of  the 
strength  and  inspiration  necessary  to  help  them  bear  with  resigna- 
tion the  sufferings  and  privations  of  this  life.  Take  away  from 
them  the  thought  of  an  hereafter  and  you  do  much  to  create  in 
them  a  spirit  of  anarchy  and  unrest  which  will  be  difficult  to 
control. 

In  organizing  the  Society  of  St  Vincent  de  Paul,  Frederic 
Ozanam,  following  the  inspiration  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  framed 
its  rules  on  the  same  principles  and  ideas  that  were  in  vogue  in 
the  seventeenth  century.  He  saw  that  people  were  falling  away 
from  religion  and  becoming  discontented,  and  that  to  bring  them 
back  to  practical  Christianity,  something  more  than  words  was 
necessary. 

"  Alas !  "  he  exclaimed,  "  We  see  the  divisions  which  exist  in 
society  growing  deeper  and  wider  every  day.  It  is  not  political 
opinions  that  divide  men;  it  is  their  interests  that  sunder  them. 
Here  is  the  camp  of  the  rich,  there  the  camp  of  the  poor.  One 
only  means  of  salvation  remains  to  us,  that  is,  that  Christians 


vi  Preface, 

in  the  name  of  love,  interpose  between  the  two  camps,  passing 
like  beneficial  deserters  from  one  to  the  other,  collecting  abun- 
dant alms  from  the  rich,  and  resignation  from  the  poor,  carrying 
gifts  to  the  poor  and  words  of  gratitude  to  the  rich,  teaching 
them  on  both  sides  to  look  upon  each  other  as  brothers,  and 
communicating  mutual  charity  to  all  until  this  charity,  paralyzing 
and  stifling  the  egotism  of  both  parties,  and  every  day  lessening 
their  antipathies,  shall  bid  the  two  camps  arise  and  break  down 
the  barriers  of  prejudice,  and  cast  aside  their  weapons  of  anger, 
and  march  forth  to  meet  each  other,  not  to  fight,  but  to  mingle 
together  in  peace  and  good  will." 

The  injection  of  Ozanam's  strong  personality  into  the  work 
served  to  attract  to  it  a  number  of  young  students  whose  Cath- 
olicity was  so  strong,  whose  faith  in  God  was  so  deep  that,  in  the 
midst  of  a  school  of  infidelity,  irreligion  and  immorality,  they 
stood  boldly  forward  publicly  proclaiming  their  belief  in  God's 
church  and  their  loyalty  to  everything  Catholic.  Would  that  our 
Catholic  young  men  of  to-day  would  strive  to  emulate  the  ex- 
ample of  those  brave  young  Parisians !  Never  was  the  time  more 
opportune  for  the  spread  of  the  spirit  of  charity  as  taught  by 
St.  Vincent  de  Paul  and  carried  out  in  detail  by  that  greatest 
of  Catholic  laymen  of  the  nineteenth  century — Frederic  Ozanam. 

In  our  large  universities  and  so-called  non-sectarian  colleges, 
where  the  Catholic  student  is  necessarily  brought  into  contact 
with  men  of  no  religious  views,  there  is  need  to-day  of  an 
Ozanam  to  stand  forth  and  encourage  his  fellow  Catholic  stu- 
dents to  strive  manfully  for  the  preservation  of  religion,  for  the 
injection  of  God  in  sociological  work,  if  the  betterment  of  God's 
poor  through  supernatural  motives  is  to  be  accomplished. 

To-day  the  world  gives  abundant  proofs  of  the  wonderful 
forethought  of  Ozanam.  He  builded  better  than  he  knew,  for, 
at  the  present  time,  conferences  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent 
de  Paul  are  to  be  found  in  every  civilized  country  of  the  world. 
Though  much  progress  has  been  made  by  the  Society  in  the 
United  States,  greater  good  could  be  accomplished  did  we  have 
sufficient  numbers  to  cope  with  the  work.  The  demand  for 
workers  is  very  great;  those  of  us  who  are  brought  daily  into 
intimate  contact  with  the  poor,  realize  fully  that  unless  the  re- 
ligious people  of  all  communities  come  forward  and  show  by  their 
actions  that  they  are  devoted  to  the  interests  of  God's  poor, 
that  they  have  the  welfare  of  their  fellow  creatures  at  heart. 


Preface.  vii 

the  muffled  mutterings  of  discontent  will  constantly  grow  louder 
and  more  bitter  and  eventually  break  forth  into  anarchy. 

Keeping  charity  closely  identified  with  religion,  so  that  they 
who  labor  for  the  benefit  of  humankind  may  be  inspired  by  the 
love  of  Christ,  and  that  they  whom  the  workers  endeavor  to 
assist  may  be  brought  to  realize  that  what  is  done  is  intended  for 
their  social  and  moral  uplift  is  the  only  practical  way  in  which 
to  carry  on  efficient  charity  work.  This  is  what  our  grand  So- 
ciety of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  is  endeavoring  to  do.  As  a  conse- 
quence the  charity  workers  of  every  denomination,  recognizing 
the  higher  aims  and  motives  of  our  members,  gladly  enlist  our 
aid  in  every  movement  looking  to  the  betterment  of  the  condition 
of  the  poor  and  lowly. 

Earnest  Vincentians  are  striving  daily  to  augment  their  num- 
bers by  bringing  into  the  ranks  of  the  Society  active,  intelligent 
and  God-fearing  young  men  who  will  willingly  devote  their  time 
and  energies  in  an  effort  to  carry  on  the  work  organized  and 
undertaken  by  Ozanam  and  his  brave  little  band  of  student  fol- 
lowers. Personally,  it  is  a  source  of  much  comfort  and  pleasure 
to  me  to  know  that  a  newer  and  enlarged  edition  of  Ozanam's 
life  is  contemplated,  for  I  am  confident  that  its  publication  must 
mean  much  added  interest  in  the  life-work  of  him,  who  was  at 
once  the  champion  of  the  faith  and  the  champion  of  the  poor. 
Would  that  a  copy  of  this  new  book  could  be  placed  in  the  hands 
of  every  Catholic  young  man  in  the  land,  for  I  am  certain  that 
no  one  can  read  this  beautiful  portrayal  of  the  life  and  character 
of  one  of  God's  chosen  men,  without  experiencing  within  himself 
an  earnest  desire  to  emulate  his  example. 

Ozanam's  life  and  Ozanam's  work  are  daily  inspirations. 
"  May  God,"  to  quote  Cardinal  Manning,  "  raise  up  on  every  side 
laymen  like  Frederic  Ozanam." 

THOMAS  M.  MULRY, 

President, 

Superior  Council  of  New  York,  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul. 


FREDERIC     OZANAM. 


CHAPTER  I. 
1813-1831. 

The  Ozanams  would  seem  to  be  one  of  those  races  where 
virtue  and  science  are  an  entailed  inheritance,  descending 
like  heirlooms  from  one  generation  to  another.  For  more 
than  three  centuries  every  generation  produced  some  dis- 
tinguished man  of  science,  and  invariably  counted  one,  fre- 
quently several,  members  in  the  service  of  the  sanctuary. 
There  is  still  preserved  amongst  the  family  treasures  a  MS- 
Office  of  Our  Lady,  in  Gothic  characters,  and  illuminated 
with  delicate  skill,  by  Elizabeth  Ozanam,  a  nun  of  the  Ursu- 
line  convent  in  the  fifteenth  century.  In  the  last  pages  of 
the  book  the  genealogy  of  the  elder  branch  of  the  Ozanams 
is  recorded,  each  generation  inscribing  its  names  and  dates 
individually. 

Not  satisfied,  however,  with  this  noble  family  tree,  the 
Ozanams  trace  back  its  roots  to  immemorial  tradition.  In 
the  first  page  *  of  the  family  records  we  read  that  one  Jere- 
miah Hozannam,t  a  praetor  m  the  38th  Roman  Legion,  came 
over  to  Gaul  with  Julius  Caesar,  after  the  conquest  of  Segu- 
via, — a  country  situated  between  the  Jura  and  the  Alps, — 
and  received  as  his  share  of  the  conquered  territory  a  can- 

•  If  this  fabulous  genealogy  were  claimed  by  any  but  a  Jewish  family,  we  should  feel 
bound  to  dismiss  it  forthwith  as  beneath  the  serious  notice  of  a  biographer.  Without, 
however,  attributing  to  the  story  more  tlian  a  legendary  importance,  it  is  too  picturesque 
to  be  omitted. 

+  Hozannam  is  the  plural  of  Hozanna,  according  to  the  Hebrew  custom  of  writing 
family  names  in  that  number. 

I 


1  jl(  i  Lif'  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

ton  called  Bellignum,  lying  north  of  Lyons,  and  known  later 
as  the  village  of  Boulignieux.  Jeremiah  reclaimed  this 
waste  land,  which  was  covered  with  woods  and  swamps, 
and  founded  there  a  little  Jewish  colony.  He  died  in  the 
year  43  before  Christ,  the  same  year  that  Caesar  was  assas- 
sinated. He  had  many  children,  but  the  eldest  is  the  only 
one  whose  genealogy  has  come  down  to  us.  He  starts  the 
long  ancestral  line  in  which  Jacob,  Ishmael,  Elias,  Abimelech, 
Jehoshaphat,  Shem,  etc.  etc.,  pass  on  like  a  procession  of  wit- 
nesses vindicating  the  pure  Jewish  origin  of  the  race.  The 
march  is  uninterrupted  until  the  beginning  of  the  seventh  cen- 
tury, when  St.  Didier,  placing  the  cross  in  its  way,  stops  it. 
The  saint,  having  denounced  Queen  Brunhaut's  wicked  man- 
ner of  life,  was  pursued  by  that  sanguinary  princess,  and  fled 
for  security  to  a  forest  near  Boulignieux,  where  Samuel  Ho- 
zannam,  the  then  chief  of  the  tribe,  sheltered  him  with  native 
hospitality.  St.  Didier  repaid  it  by  baptizing  him  and  his 
people  in  the  true  faith,  and  henceforth  we  see  Matthias, 
John,  Peter,  and  other  Christian  names  intermingling  more 
and  more  with  the  old  Hebrew  ones.  The  saint  was  seized 
at  last  by  the  emissaries  of  Brunhaut,  and  strangled  on  the 
banks  of  a  little  stream  called  the  Renom,  where,  in  course  of 
time,  a  village  arose,  and  was  called  St.  Didier  de  Renom. 

Benedict,  grandfather  of  the  subject  of  this  memoir,  was 
the  first  to  suppress  one  n  and  the  initial  If  in  the  family 
name,  which  from  this  time  forth  we  see  written  "  Ozanam." 
Benedict  was  nephew  of  Jacques  Ozanam,  the  famous  ma- 
thematician, whose  panegyric  was  written  by  Fontenelle, 
and  whose  quaint  saying,  significant  enough  of  his  times, 
has  been  so  often  quoted  by  his  contemporaries  :  '*  It  is  the 
.  business  of  the  doctors  of  the  Sorbonne  to  dispute,  that  of  the 
pope  to  dogmatize,  and  of  mathematicians  to  go  to  heaven  by 
the  perpendicular." 

Such  is  the  story  of  the  remoter  ancestors  of  Frederic. 
Antoine,  his  father,  when  a  very  young  man,  was  forced,  by 
the  law  of  conscription,  to  serve  in  the  army  for  five  years. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam  3 

He  entered  a  hussar  regiment,  and  made  the  Italian  campaign 
under  Napoleon,  then  only  a  general,  and  had  his  share  in 
the  glories  of  Lodi,  Areola,  Pavia,  Rivoli,  etc.  He  received 
five  wounds  on  one  field  of  battle ;  in  spite  of  this,  and  dis- 
armed, he  captured  the  Neapolitan  general,  Prince  de  Catto- 
lica,  and  led  him  prisoner  to  Bologna,  a  feat  which  establish- 
ed his  reputation  for  valor  and  soldiership. 

When  the  wars  of  the  Republic  were  over,  Antoine,  un- 
willing to  serve  under  the  Empire,  returned  to  his  native 
town,  Lyons,  and  soon  after  married  Mademoiselle  Nantas, 
the  daughter  of  a  wealthy  merchant  of  that  city.  He  de- 
voted himself  to  commercial  pursuits,  and  so  successfully 
that  in  a  few  years  he  was  in  possession  of  a  handsome  for- 
tune. He  then  came  to  reside  in  Paris,  where  he  lived  very 
happily,  until  one  day  he  gave  his  signature  to  a  near  relative 
who  was  in  pecuniary  diflSculties.  The  kind  but  imprudent 
act  resulted  in  his  complete  ruin.  Everything  was  lost; 
even  his  furniture  was  sold  ofld  The  Emperor  heard  of  it, 
and  »ent  him  at  once  a  brevet  of  captain  in  his  own  guards, 
which  he  was  just  then  raising,  accompanied  by  a  very  flat- 
tering message  to  "the  brilliant  officer  whose  valor  had 
made  a  lively  impression  on  him."  But  Ozanam  declined 
theoflfer;  he  could  not  forgive  Bonaparte  for  having  made 
a  stepping-stone  of  the  Republic  to  an  Empire,  and  preferred 
to  face  the  world,  beggared  as  he  was,  in  independence. 
His  indomitable  gayety  and  firmness  of  character  enabled 
him  to  meet  poverty  with  the  same  intrepidity  with  which 
he  had  faced  death  at  the  cannon's  mouth.  He  left  his  wife 
and  young  children  in  Paris,  and  set  out  for  Italy,  where  he 
had  made  some  friends  during  his  military  stay,  and  where 
he  hoped  to  turn  his  French  education  to  better  profit  than  in 
his  own  country.  He  met  with  great  sympathy,  and  secured  a 
sufficient  number  of  lessons  at  Milan  to  enable  him  to  send 
for  his  family  and  settle  down  there  as  a  professor.  Madame 
Ozanam  and  her  children  were  accompanied  by  a  faithful 
servant,  who  went  by  the  name  of  Gui-gui  amongst  the  chi? 


4  Life  and  Works  of  Fredem  Ozanam, 

dren — a  wonderful  typ  of  the  old  Fren  h  sfrvant  that  one 
hears  of  in  records  of  former  generations,  but  seldom,  if  in- 
deed ever,  meets  with  in  the  present  one*  GuUgui  shared 
her  master's  poverty  and  worked  her  fingers  to  the  bone  to 
add  her  mite  to  the  common  store  in  those  first  days  of  sud- 
den distress. 

M.  Ozanam,  while  working  hard  at  his  "lessons,"  had 
begun  to  study  medicine,  and,  thanks  to  his  indefatigable 
industry,  and  to  that  inherited  instinct  of  science  which 
seemed  the  birthright  of  his  name,  he  was  able,  at  the  end 
of  two  years,  to  pass  his  examinations  with  brilliant  success, 
and  very  soon  acquired  a  fine  practice.  He  devoted  a 
large  share  of  his  time  to  the  poor,  but  his  disinterested 
kindness  showed  itself  more  especially  to  the  sick  soldiers  of 
the  garrison.  A  terrible  epidemic  broke  out  at  Milan,  and 
raged  with  peculiar  fury  amongst  the  troops ;  the  two  medi- 
cal men  attached  to  the  military  hospital  caught  the  fever 
and  died.  Dr.  Ozanam  volunteered  to  replace  them,  and,  tak- 
ing up  his  abode  in  the  hospital,  he  remained  there  till  the  end 
of  the  pestilence,  with  the  sole  unaided  charge  of  several 
hundred  invalids. 

It  was  during  this  memorable  year,  1813,  that  his  son 
Frederic  was  born,  on  the  13th  of  April. 

The  entrance  of  the  Austrians  into  Milan  decided  Dr. 
Ozanam  to  leave  that  city,  it  being  repugnant  to  him  to  re- 
main under  a  rule  that  was  no  longer  French.  He  returned 
once  more  to  Lyons,  where  the  fame  of  his  medical  skill  had 
already  travelled,  so  as  to  secure  him  soon  after  his  arrival 
a  sufficiently  large  practice.  But  although  his  practice  in- 
creased rapidly,  and  placed  him  for  many  years  at  the  head 
of  his  profession,  Dr.  Ozanam  never  became  a  rich  man. 
Wealth  was  never  his  first  aim ;  he  looked  upon  the  medical 
profession  as  a  sort  of  priesthood,  and  divided  his  labors  al- 
most equally  between  the  rich  and  the  poor.  His  wife  foi 
seventeen  years  seconded  him  nobly  in  this  apostolate  of 
charity.     When  they  had  both  g-own  old,  and  were  no  Ion- 


?}/:s  oj  Ircdaic  OzanaiTU  5 

ger  able  to  climb  so  nimbly  up  six  and  seven  stories  to  the 
garrets  where  his  poorer  patients  dwelt,  they  bound  each 
other  by  a  mutual  promise  not  to  go  beyond  the  fourth  story. 
Dr.  Ozanam's  infirm  health  made  this  limitation  the  more 
necessary,  in  that  he  was  subject  to  a  giddiness  which  seized 
him  without  warning  at  any  moment.  His  wife,  for  her  part, 
suffered  from  an  oppression  of  the  chest,  which  was  increased 
almost  to  suflfocation  by  mounting  stairs.  Many  a  time  the 
poor  neighbors  of  those  whom  she  was  toiling  up  to  sec  have 
come  out  of  their  rooms  and  found  her  sitting  on  the  stairs, 
panting  for  breath.  The  husband  and  wife  were  not  always 
loyal  in  keeping  to  their  mutual  promise.  More  than  once 
it  happened  that  the  doctor,  coming  discreetly  down  from 
the  seventh  floor,  where  some  more  than  common  misery  had 
enticed  him,  came  face  to  face  with  his  wife  treacherously 
climbing  up  to  it.  It  was  in  coming  from  one  of  those 
abodes  of  poverty  that  he  eventually  met  his  death.  Fami- 
liar as  he  was  with  the  perils  of  the  dark,  broken  stairs,  he 
made  a  false  step  and  fell,  injuring  himself  so  severely  that 
he  died  the  next  day.  He  had  had  fourteen  children,  all  of 
whom  died  in  childhood,  except  a  daughter,  whom  he  lost 
at  the  age  of  nineteen,  and  three  sons,  of  whom  Frederic  was 
the  second. 

Frederic's  childhood  offers  none  of  those  picturesque  or 
striking  incidents  that  we  like  to  discover  in  the  dawn  of 
great  men.  His  one  salient  trait  was  an  excessive  sensibility 
to  the  sufferings  of  others.  It  is  related  that  when  little  more 
than  a  baby,  at  Milan,  he  could  never  hear  the  little  sweeps 
as  they  passed  under  his  nursery  windows  of  a  morning  cry- 
ing, **  Spazza  camino  !  spazza  camino  1"  without  sitting  up  in 
liis  cot  to  listen  with  an  expression  of  intense  pity  on  his  face 
until  the  plaintive,  childish  voice  died  away ;  then  he  would 
exclaim  with  a  little  sigh,  "Poor  spazza  camino!'*  and  lie 
down  again. 

This  precocious  sensibility  did  not,  however,  exclude  a 
certain  self-willed  energy  and  vehemence  of  temper.     He  wa» 


6  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

very  fond  of  games,  and  very  punctilious  about  keeping  to 
fair  play;  but  nothing  could  ever  make  him  own  that  he 
was  beaten ;  when  his  playfellows  insisted  on  his  giving  them 
this  legitimate  satisfaction,  the  child  would  stamp  his  small 
foot  on  the  ground  and  protest  that  he  *'  would  rather  die 
than  say  it !" 

We  find  in  a  letter  written  to  a  confidential  friend  at  the 
age  of  sixteen,  a  sort  of  autobiography  of  these  early  days, 
which  is  sufficiently  characteristic  to  be  regarded  as  tru  hful 
in  its  self-judgment : 


"  Now  let  me  tell  you,"  he  says, '  "what  I  have  been  up  to  this  day.  They 
say  I  was  very  gentle  and  docile  as  a  child,  and  they  attribute  this  mainly  to 
my  feeble  health ;  but  I  account  for  it  in  another  way.  I  had  a  sister,  such  a 
beloved  sister  1  who  used  to  take  it  in  turns  v/ith  my  mother  to  teach  me,  and 
whose  lessons  were  so  sweet,  so  well  explained,  so  admirably  suited  to  my 
childish  comprehension  as  to  be  a  real  delig:ht  to  me.  All  things  considered, 
I  was  pretty  good  at  this  period  of  my  life,  and,  with  the  exception  of  some 
trifling  peccadilloes,  I  have  not  much  to  reproach  myself  with. 

•'At  seven  years  old  I  had  a  serious  illness,  which  brought  me  so  near 
death  that  everybody  said  I  was  saved  by  a  miracle ;  not  that  I  wanted  kind 
care  :  my  dear  father  and  mother  hardly  left  my  bedside  for  fifteen  days  and 
nights.  I  was  on  the  point  of  expiring  when  suddenly  I  asked  for  some  beer, 
[  had  always  disliked  beer,  but  it  saved  me.  I  recovered,  and  sbc  months 
tater  my  sister,  my  darling  sister,  died.  Oh!  what  grief  that  was.  Then  I 
Degan  to  learn  Latin,  and  to  be  naughty ;  really  and  truly  I  believe  I  never 
was  so  wicked  as  at  eight  years  old.  And  yet  I  was  being  educated  by  a 
kind  father  and  a  kind  mother  and  an  excellent  brother ;  I  loved  them  dearly, 
and  at  this  period  I  had  no  friends  outside  my  family  ;  yet  I  was  obstinate, 
passionate,  disobedient.  I  was  punished,  and  I  rebelled  against  it.  I  used  to 
write  letters  to  my  mother  complaining  of  my  punishments.  I  was  lazy  to 
the  last  degree,  and  used  to  plan  all  sorts  of  naughtiness  in  my  mind.  This 
is  a  true  portrait  of  me  as  I  was  on  first  going  to  school  at  nine  and  a  half 
years  old.  By  degrees  I  improved ;  emulation  cured  my  laziness.  I  was 
very  fond  of  my  master ;  I  had  some  little  success,  which  encouraged  me.  I 
studied  with  ardor,  and  at  the  same  time  I  began  to  feel  some  emotions  of 
pride.  I  must  also  confess  that  I  exchanged  a  great  number  of  blows  with 
my  companions.  But  I  changed  very  much  for  the  better  when  I  entered  the 
fifth  class.  I  fell  ill,  and  was  obliged  to  go  for  a  month  to  the  country,  to  the 
house  of  a  very  kind  lady,  where  I  acquired  some  degree  of  polish,  which  I 
lost  in  great  part  soon  after. 

"  I  grew  rather  idle  in  the  fourth  class,  but  I  pulled  up  again  in  the  third. 
It  was  then  that  I  made  my  first  Communion.    O  glad  and  bussed  day « 


Life  a'ld  Works  of  Fredenc  Ozanam.  7 

nay  my  right  hand  wither  and  my  tong:ue  cleave  to  the  rcx>f  of  my  mouth  if  I 
ever  forget  thee  I 

'  I  had  cbang:ed  a  good  deal  by  this  time ;  I  had  become  modest,  gentle, 
and  docile,  more  industrious  and  unhappily  also  rather  scrtipaloas.  I  still 
continued  proud  and  impatient." 

Although,  looking  back  from  the  sustained  energy  of  sixteen 
to  these  first  beginnings,  Frederic  accuses  himself  of  laziness, 
he  was  considered  a  dihgent  h'ttle  scholar  from  the  time  of 
his  entrance  into  school  until  his  leaving  it ;  but,  like  almost 
all  children  endowed  with  special  gifts,  there  was  a  dispropor- 
tion in  the  way  he  applied  himself— some  studies  were  irk- 
some and  distasteful  to  him,  while  others  he  found  attractive 
and  easy.  He  bestowed  special  pains,  for  instance,  on  his 
Latin,  and  displayed  such  a  facility  for  Latin  verses  that  his 
teacher,  M.  Legeay,  a  veteran  classicist  of  the  old  school, 
thought  it  worth  while  preserving  many  of  them,  some  of  which 
he  published  in  a  biographical  notice  after  his  pupil's  death. 
During  his  passage  through  the  third  and  second  class,  be- 
tween thirteen  and  fourteen  years  of  age,  Frederic  commenc- 
ed and  very  nearly  completed  a  voluminous  Latin  poem  on 
the  taking  of  Jerusalem  by  Titus.  The  range  of  his  juvenile 
muse  was  wide  and  ambitious,  judging  from  the  specimens 
preserved  by  M.  Legeay.  There  were  airy  flights  with  the 
skylark,  mystic  communings  with  the  moon  and  the  stars,  an 
adieu  of  Marie  Antoinette  to  the  Princess  Elizabeth,  written 
in  stately  Virgilian  hexameters,  hymns  on  sacred  subjects, 
tender  canticles  to  the  Madonna.  "  I  was  often  astounded 
at  the  strength  and  elevation  of  these  young  flights,**  says  M. 
Legeay ;  "  his  analyses  of  sacred  and  ancient  history  were 
quite  surprising.  The  subjects  where  he  shone  most  were 
those  which  gave  scope  for  religious  and  patriotic  sentiments.'* 

At  fourteen  he  entered  the  class  of  higher  studies,  and  this 
was  to  be  the  signal  of  a  new  and  painful  experience  which 
left  its  mark  on  the  boy's  whole  after-life.  Up  to  this  period 
he  had  never  known  what  it  was  to  doubt;  his  faith  had  been 
as  placid  and  as  trusting  as  a  child's ;  but  the  moment  had 


8  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

come  when  he  was  to  pay  for  the  precocious  maturity  of  his 
mind  and  the  lofty  flights  of  his  imagination ;  the  intellectual 
activity  which  had  so  quickened  his  mental  powers  suddenly 
kindled  a  flame  within  him  that  stirred  vital  questions,  and 
evoked  the  demon  of  doubt,  that  torment  of  noble  and  un- 
quiet souls  who  hunger  to  believe,  and  cannot  rest  until  reason 
has  justified  belief.  Like  Pascal  and  Joubert  and  other  deep 
thinkers,  Frederic  was  doomed  to  experience,  as  he  himself 
described  it  long  years  afterwards, "  the  horror  of  those  doubts 
that  eat  into  the  heart,  pursuing  us  even  at  night  to  the  pillow 
we  have  drenched  with  our  tears."  Suddenly,  without  his 
being  able  to  discover  any  immediate  cause  for  it,  a  change 
came  over  him,  his  childlike  peace  was  overclouded,  he  began 
to  question,  to  argue,  to  all  but  disbelieve.  In  a  confidential 
letter  to  the  school-fellow  before  quoted  from,  he  thus  alludes 
to  this  crisis :  **  I  must  tell  you  now  of  a  most  painful  ex- 
perience which  began  forme  just  as  I  entered  on  my  rhetoric, 
and  which  only  ended  last  year.  By  dint,  I  suppose,  of  hear- 
ing people  talk  of  infidels  and  infidelity,  I  came  one  day  to 
ask  myself  why  I  believed.  Doubt  presented  itself,  but  I  re- 
pulsed the  doubt,  for  I  felt  I  must  believe ;  I  read  all  the 
books  I  knew  of  which  explained  and  defended  religion,  but 
none  of  them  fully  satisfied  me ;  I  would  believe  for  a  month 
or  two  on  the  authority  of  such  and  such  a  teacher,  then  an 
objection  would  start  up  in  my  mind,  and  the  doubts  returned 

stronger  than  ever.     O  my  dear ,  how  I  did  suffer !  for 

I  wanted  to  keep  my  faith.  I  dipped  into  Vallar,  but  Vallar 
did  not  satisfy  me ;  my  faith  was  shaken,  and  yet  I  preferred 
to  cling  to  it,  to  believe  without  understanding,  than  to  go  on 
doubting,  because  doubt  was  such  a  torture.  In  this  state  I 
began  my  philosophy.  The  thesis  of  *  certainty  *  bewildered 
me ;  it  seemed  to  me  for  a  moment  that  I  might  doubt  my 
own  existence." 

This  trial  left  such  a  deep  impression  on  him  that  Frederic 
never  in  after-life  could  allude  to  it  without  strong  emotion. 
One  day,  when  the  temptation  was  at  its  worst,  clutching 


Life  and  Works  of  FrecUru  Ozanam.  9 

him  almost  like  a  physical  pain,  a  sudden  impulse  drove  him 
towards  a  church  near  which  he  happened  to  be  walking;  he 
quickened  his  steps,  entered,  and,  falling  on  his  knees,  prayed 
with  all  his  soul  to  be  delivered  from  the  trial,  promising  that 
if  God  gave  him  light  to  see  the  truth  he  would  for  ever  af- 
ter devote  himself  to  its  defence.  While  uttering  this  prayer, 
he  felt  that  he  was  committing  himself  to  a  distinct  pledge, 
which  must  color  his  whole  life ;  that  if  his  faith  were  restored 
to  him,  his  life  must  be  consecrated  to  its  service  in  no  ordi- 
nary way.  Referring  to  the  circumstance  in  the  last  work 
he  ever  wrote,  with  that  shuddering  sense  of  a  danger  escap- 
ed which  he  retained  to  the  last,  he  says :  *'  The  uncertainty 
of  my  eternal  destiny  left  me  no  peace;  I  clung  to  the  sa- 
cred dogmas  in  desperation,  but  they  seemed  to  break  in  my 
grasp ;  then  it  was  that  the  teaching  of  one  who  was  both 
a  priest  and  a  philosopher  saved  me ;  he  brought  light  into 
my  mind ;  I  believed  henceforth  with  an  assured  faith,  and, 
touched  by  this  mercy,  vowed  to  consecrate  my  days  to  the 
service  of  that  truth  which  had  given  me  peace." 

The  philosopher  and  priest  here  alluded  to  was  the  Abb6 
Noirot,  a  man  whose  wisdom,  learning,  and  seductive  piety 
made  him  a  power  with  a  generation  of  young  spirits,  con- 
temporaries of  Ozanam. 

M.  Ampere  says  of  the  Abb6  Noirot:  "All  those  who 
studied  under  this  cherished  master  agree  that  he  had  a  par- 
ticular gift  for  directing  and  developing  each  one  in  his  voca- 
tion. He  proceeded  with  his  pupils  on  the  Socratic  method. 
When  he  saw  a  young  rhetorician  arrive  at  his  class  of  phi- 
losophy,  puffed  out  with  recent  success,  and  as  full  of  impor- 
tance as  ever  Euthydemus  or  Gorgias  was,  the  Christian  So- 
crates began  by  bringing  the  young  rhetorician  gently  to  re- 
cognize the  fact  that  he  knew  nothing ;  and  then,  when  he 
had  crushed  him  under  the  weight  of  his  own  weakness,  he 
raised  him  up,  and  set  to  work  to  point  out  to  him  what  he 
really  could  do.  The  influence  of  this  able  master  decided 
the  course  of  Ozanam's  mind.** 


/ 


y  to  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

Lacordaire  tells  us  how  the  master  loved  to  take  this  fa- 
vorite  scholar  as  the  companion  of  his  walks,  and  how,  in 
their  solitary  rambles  over  the  steep  and  lonely  roads  out- 
gide  Lyons,  the  mature  philosopher  and  the  boy  would  for- 
get the  lapse  of  time  while  they  discoursed  on  deep  and  lofty 
themes — God  and  His  dealings  with  men  being  the  one 
they  delighted  most  to  dwell  on — till  the  shades  of  night 
overtook  them,  as  they  hurried  homewards. 

Frederic  was  the  youngest  of  the  hundred  and  thirty  pu- 
pils who  studied  under  the  Abb6  Noirot;  he  reached  the 
head  of  his  class  very  quickly,  and  remained  there  till  he  left. 
**  He  was  an  elect  soul,"  says  this  venerable  master,  who 
still  survives,  and  still,  in  his  eighty-fourth  year,  charms  the 
young  men  who  seek  his  wisdom  for  advice,  as  their  fathers 
did;  "  he  was  marvellously  endowed  by  nature,  both  in  mind 
and  heart;  his  industry  was  incredible;  he  worked  all  day 
without  intermission,  and  a  part  of  the  night ;  he  was  devot- 
ed, ardent,  and  singularly  modest ;  he  was  cheerful,  even 
gay,  but  there  was  always  an  undercurrent  of  seriousness  in 
him ;  he  loved  a  joke  dearly,  and  was  sure  to  be  in  the 
midst  of  any  fun  going,  for  there  never  was  a  boy  more  popu- 
as  with  other  boys.  But  I  never  heard  of  him  being  in  any 
mischief;  he  was  most  affectionate  and  sympathetic ;  I  don't 
believe  Frederic  was  capable  of  inspiring  or  harboring  an  an- 
tipathy; he  was,  however,  very  fiery,  and  had  often  vehe- 
ment bursts  of  indignation,  but  not  against  individuals;  I 
never  knew  him  angry  or  embittered  against  any  one;  he 
was  simply  inaccessible  to  hatred,  except  against  falsehood 
or  wrong-doing."  Such  is  his  portrait  at  seventeen,  as  it  is 
inscribed  on  the  memory  of  one  who  knew  him  well,  and 
whose  tender  admiration  for  him  is  as  fresh  to-day  as  it  was 
forty  years  ago. 

But  these  days  of  study  and  pleasant  companionship  were 
drawing  to  a  close.  Frederic  had  completed  his  term  of  phi- 
losophy, and  was  now  ready  to  enter  on  the  study  of  the  law. 
For  this  purpose  it  was  necessary  for  him  to  go  to  Paris;  but 


Life  and  Wotks  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  ti 

Dr.  Ozanam,  in  spite  of  the  confidence  he  had  in  his  son's 
steadiness  and  principles,  shrank,  naturally  enough,  from 
sending  the  boy  adrift  alone  on  that  dangerous  sea  where  so 
many  noble  young  hearts  are  daily  shipwrecked.  It  was  de- 
cided, therefore,  that  he  should  wait  for  a  couple  of  years 
at  Lyons,  and  be  employed  meantime  in  some  way  which 
might  serve  as  a  preliminary  to  future  studies  at  the  Ecole  de 
Droit.  The  choice  of  the  intermediate  occupation  was  about 
the  most  uncongenial  to  the  young  man's  taste  that  could 
have  been  made.  He  was  placed  as  clerk  in  an  attorney's 
office.  Much,  however,  as  he  recoiled  from  the  uninterest- 
ing nature  of  the  position,  he  accepted  it  without  repining, 
and  took  his  seat  cheerfully  in  the  dusky  office,  where  there 
was  little  to  remind  him  of  the  poetic  and  philosophical  re- 
gions in  which  he  had  hitherto  dwelt.  He  worked  away  as 
diligently  copying  law  papers  as  if  they  had  been  so  many 
theses  he  was  preparing  for  M.  Noirot,  and  listened  with  def- 
erential patience  to  the  long-winded  perorations  of  the  head 
clerk.  But,  do  what  he  would,  he  could  find  no  pleasure  in 
the  work;  so,  when  he  had  done  all  that  duty  demanded,  he 
lightened  the  intervals  by  studying  English,  German,  He- 
brew, and  even  Sanscrit ;  in  after-office-hours  he  read  also 
enormously,  and  even  found  leisure  to  write  a  treatise  against 
the  St.  Simonians,  which  may  be  said  to  have  struck  the  key- 
note of  his  future  literary  career.  "  It  was  like  a  preface  to 
the  work  which  was  to  occupy  him  to  the  end  of  his  days," 
says  M.  Ampere. 

The  sect  known  as  the  St.  Simonians  was  so  called  from 
one  of  its  first  enthusiasts,  who,  after  his  death,  was  erected 
into  its  founder,  no  one  else  being  forthcoming  to  claim  the 
title.  The  religion  of  St.  Simon  was  born  of  the  moral  and 
social  disorganization  which  followed  after  the  revolution  of 
1830.  Its  main  tactic  was  to  glorify  Christianity  in  the  past, 
while  denying  and  vilifying  it  in  the  present,  treating  it  as  a 
worn-out  creed,  and  building  up  upon  its  ruins  the  new  re- 
ligion— *'  the  religion  of  the  future,"  as  it  boldly  styled  itsel£ 


12  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

It  had  made  a  good  deal  of  noise  in  various  parts  of  France, 
fascinating  many  restless  young  spirits,  who,  impatient  of  the 
prevailing  apathy,  and  hungering  for  a  faith  of  some  sort, 
caught  eagerly  at  a  creed  which  seemed  to  promise  a  solution 
of  the  great  social  problem.  In  the  course  of  the  winter  the 
St.  Simonians  came  to  Lyons,  and  were  reaping  there  the 
same  ephemeral  harvest  which  had  rewarded  them  elsewhere. 
Frederic  had  some  passages  of  arms  with  them  in  the  col- 
umns of  the  local  journals ;  but,  not  satisfied  with  this,  he  set 
to  work  and  composed  his  treatise,  which  appeared  in  the 
month  of  April,  1831,  and  dealt  a  heavy  blow  at  the  sect  he 
combated.  M.  de  Lamartine,  on  reading  it,  wrote  at  once 
to  congratulate  Frederic,  observing  that  his  admiration  for  the 
talent  of  the  author  was  heightened  by  his  astonishment  at 
his  age.  "  This  beginning,"  he  adds,  "  promises  us  a  new 
combatant  in  the  sacred  struggle  of  religious  and  moral  phi- 
losophy which  this  century  is  sustaining  against  a  materialis- 
tic reaction.  Like  you,  I  augur  well  for  the  issue.  We  do 
not  see  it,  but  the  voice  of  conscience,  that  infallible  prophet 
of  the  brave  man's  heart,  promises  us  that  our  children  shall. 
Let  us  trust  to  this  instinctive  promise,  and  live  in  the  future." 
Such  episodes  seem  somewhat  out  of  keeping  with  the  pur- 
suits of  an  attorney's  clerk;  but  Frederic  felt  that  this  was 
only  a  temporary  phase,  which  might  usefully  serve  as  an  ap- 
prenticeship, but  which,  meantime,  must  not  absorb  him  to 
the  exclusion  of  higher  interests.  He  never  lost  sight  of  this 
fact;  and  while  fulfilling  conscientiously  his  daily  task,  he 
was  working  still  more  assiduously  to  prepare  himself  for  the 
higher  one  that  was  awaiting  him.  He  set  himself  to  study 
the  state  of  society  in  France,  and  the  knowledge  which,  even 
in  his  present  narrow  sphere,  he  gained  of  it,  of  the  deep- 
seated  evils  eating  into  its  heart,  filled  him  with  profound  pity 
and  an  intense  longing  to  help  even  remotely  towards  bring- 
ing about  a  better  state  of  things,  or  at  least  to  cast  in  his 
labors  with  others  better  competent  to  deal  with  so  tremen- 
dous a  problem. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  fj 

The  following  letter,  written  at  the  age  of  seventeen  and  a 
half,  to  two  college  friends,  reveals  fully  his  views  and  ambi- 
tions at  this  period : 

"iS/^Tir*.,  1831. 

"...  You  ask  what  people  think  here.  It  would  be  very  diflScult  for 
me  to  tell  you.  Philosophically  speaking,  my  belief  is  that  in  the  provinces 
people  don't  think  at  all,  or  at  least  very  little  ;  they  live  a  life  purely  indus- 
trial and  material ;  everybody  looks  after  his  personal  comforts,  and  takes 
care  of  number  one  ;  and  when  that  personage  is  satisfied,  when  the  purse  is 
replenished,  then  people  discuss  politics  quietly  by  the  fireside,  or  round  the  bil- 
liard-table ;  there  is  a  great  deal  of  fine  talk  concerning  liberty,  about  which 
the  talkers  themselves  understand  very  little  ;  people  praise  the  conduct  of  the 
National  Guard  and  the  Schools  in  the  joumies  of  December,  but  they  make 
small  account  of  the  protestations  and  proclamations  of  the  gentlemen  of  the 
Elcole  de  Droit,  who,  on  the  contrary,  are  severely  blamed  for  attempting  to 
govern  the  Government,  and  plant  their  little  republic  in  the  midst  of  our  mon- 
archy. Material  order,  moderate  liberty,  bread  and  money,  this  is  all  people 
want  here  ;  they  are  sick  of  revolutions  and  pine  for  rest ;  in  a  word,  the  men 
of  the  provinces  are  neither  men  of  the  past  nor  men  of  the  future,  they  are 
men  of  the  present,  •  see-saw  men,'  as  the  Gazette  calls  them. 

*'  So  much  for  my  surroundings.  And  after  that  you  want  to  know  what  I 
think ;  a  poor  little  dwarf  like  me  who  sees  things  from  afar,  through  the 
newspapers,  which  are  seldom  to  be  trusted,  and  the  still  more  absurd  gossip 
of  our  politicians,  like  a  man  looking  through  a  bad  eye-glass  1  .  ,  .  All  I 
can  do  is  to  keep  my  temper,  to  read  just  enough  news  to  know  what  is  going 
on,  to  confine  myself  as  much  as  possible  to  my  individual  sphere,  to  improve 
my  mind  while  keeping  aloof  for  the  present,  pursuing  my  studies  outside 
society,  so  that  I  may  be  able  to  enter  it  later  with  some  advantage  for  others 
and  for  m>*self ;  this  is  the  line  of  conduct  I  have  felt  compelled  to  adopt,  and 
which  M.  Noirot  encourages  me  to  persevere  in,  and  which  I  advise  you,  my 
dear  friend,  to  adopt  also ;  for,  honestly,  we  young  fellows  are  too  green  at 
present,  too  insufficiently  nourished  with  the  living  sap  of  science,  to  b« 
able  to  offer  any  ripe  fruit  to  society.  Let  us  not  make  haste,  and  while  the 
•torm  throws  down  many  who  are  on  the  heights,  let  us  grow  quietly  in  the 
shade,  so  that  we  may  prove  ourselves  full-grown  men,  full  of  vigor,  when  the 
days  of  transition  shall  have  passed  away,  and  we  shall  be  wanted.  For  my 
part,  my  choice  is  made,  my  plan  for  the  future  is  sketched  out,  and,  as  in 
friendship  bound,  I  will  tell  you  what  it  is. 

'•  Like  you,  I  feel  that  the  past  is  falling  to  pieces,  that  the  foundations  of 
the  old  edifice  are  shaken,  and  that  a  terrible  convulsion  has  changed  the  face 
of  the  earth.  But  what  is  to  come  out  of  these  ruins  ?  Is  society  to  remain 
buried  under  the  rubbish  of  its  broken  thrones,  or  is  it  to  arise  and  reappear 
younger,  more  brilliant,  more  beautiful  ?  Shall  we  behold  novos  ccelos  et 
novam  t  err  am  ?  There  is  the  question.  I,  who  believe  in  Providence,  and 
4o  not  despair  of  my  country,  like  Charles  Nodier,  I  believe  in  a  fori  of 


14  ^^f^  ^^^^  Works  of  Fndefic  Ozanam, 

palingenesis ;  but  what  is  to  be  the  f  Drm,  what  is  to  be  the  law,  of  this  new 
order  of  society,  I  do  not  undertake  to  prophesy. 

•'  Nevertheless,  what  I  feel  confident  of  is  that  there  exists  a  Providence, 
and  that  that  Providence  cannot  for  six  thousand  years  have  abandoned  rea- 
sonable creatures,  naturally  desirous  of  the  true,  the  good,  and  the  beautiful, 
to  the  genius  of  evil  and  error  ;  that,  consequently,  all  the  creeds  of  humanity 
cannot  have  been  mere  extravagant  delusions,  and  that  there  are  truths  scat- 
tered over  the  world.  The  thing  is  to  discover  these  truths,  and  to  disengage 
them  from  the  falsehoods  they  are  mixed  up  with  ;  we  must  search  the  ruins 
of  the  old  world  for  the  comer-stone  on  which  the  new  is  to  be  rebuilt.  It 
would  be  very  much  like  those  pillars  which  historians  tell  us  were  raised  be- 
fore the  deluge  to  transmit  existing  traditions  to  those  who  might  survive, 
just  as  the  ark,  borne  over  the  waters,  bore  safely  within  it  the  fathers  of  the 
human  species.  But  this  comer-stone,  this  pillar  of  traditions,  this  lifeboat, 
where  are  we  to  seek  for  it  ?  Amidst  all  the  notions  of  antiquity  where  are 
we  to  dig  for  the  only  true  and  legitimate  ores  ?  Where  must  we  begin,  and 
where  end  ? 

"  And  here  I  stop,  and  set  to  thinking  in  this  wise  :  the  first  want  of  man, 
the  first  want  of  society,  is  some  notion  of  a  religion.    The  human  heart 
tliirsts  for  the  infinite.    Moreover,  if  there  be  a  God,  and  if  there  be  men, 
/    there  must  be  some  connection  between  them,  hence  a  religion  of  some  sort ; 
consequently,  a  primitive  revelation ;  consequently,  again,  there  is  a  primi- 
tive religion,  ancient  in  its  origin,  essentially  divine,  and  therefore  essentially 
y  true.    This  is  the  inheritance,  transmitted  from  on  high  to  th^  first  man,  and 
from  the  first  man  to  his  descendants,  that  I  am  bent  on  discovering.    And  I 
mean  to  pursue  my  search  through  time  and  space,  stirring  the  dust  of  tombs, 
digging  up  the  mbbish  of  temples,  disentombing  all  the  myths  from  the  savages 
of  Cook  to  the  Egypt  of  Sesostris,  from  the  Indians  of  Vishnu  to  the  Scandi- 
navians of  Odin.     I  investigate  the  traditions  of  every  people,  I  enquire  into 
their  reason  and  origin,  and,  aided  by  the  lights  of  geography  and  history,  I 
recognize  in  every  religion  two  distinct  elements — one  variable,  individual, 
secondary,  having  its  origin  in  the  circumstance  of  time  and  place  in  which 
tach  people  found  itself ;  another  immutable,  universal,  primitive,  inexplica- 
r    ble  to  history  and  geography ;  and  as  this  latter  element  is  to  be  found  in  all 
^     religious  creeds,  and  stands  out  more  complete  and  pure  according  as  we  re- 
mount to  the  most  remote  antiquity,  I  conclude  that  it  is  this  alone  which 
■  reigned  in  the  early  days,  and  which  constitutes  the  primitive  religion  of  man. 
I  conclude,  consequently,  that  religious  truth  is  that  which,  spread  all  over  the 
face  of  the  earth,  is  to  be  found  amidst  all  nations,  transmitted  by  the  first 
man  to  his  posterity,  then  corrupted  and  mixed  up  with  all  sorts  of  fables  and 
falsehoods. 

**This  is  what  I  felt  society  wanted.  I  was  conscious  of  a  corresponding 
want  in  myself.  I  had  need  of  something  solid  to  take  hold  of,  something 
♦hat  I  could  take  root  in  and  cling  to,  in  order  to  resist  the  torrent  of  doubt ; 
and  then,  O  my  friends !  my  soul  was  filled  with  a  great  joy  and  a  great  con- 
Kolation  ;  (or,  lo  I  it  discovered,  by  the  sheer  force  of  reason,  that  this  some' 
thing  w^s  none  other  than  that  Catholicism  which  was  first  taught  me  by  m^ 


Life  and  Works  of  FrfcUric  Otanaim.  15 

mother,  which  was  dear  to  my  childhood,  and  so  often  fed  n\y  mind  and  heart 
with  its  beautiful  memories,  and  its  still  more  beautiful  hopes — Catholicism, 
with  all  its  {grandeurs  and  all  its  delights  I  Shedcen  for  a  time  by  doubt,  I  feel 
the  invincible  need  to  cling,  with  all  my  might,  to  the  pillar  of  the  temple, 
were  it  even  to  crush  me  in  its  fall ;  and,  lo  !  I  find  this  same  pillar  supported 
by  science,  luminous  with  the  beams  of  wisdom,  of  glory,  and  of  beauty.  I 
find  it,  and  I  clasp  it  with  enthusiastic  love.  I  will  take  my  stand  by  its  side, 
and  there,  stretching  out  my  arm,  I  will  point  to  it  as  a  beacon  of  deliverance 
to  those  who  are  tossing  on  the  sea  of  life.  Happy  shall  I  be  if  a  few  friends 
come  and  rally  round  me.  Then  we  should  unite  our  efforts,  and  create  a 
work  together,  others  would  join  us,  and,  perchance,  the  day  would  come 
when  all  mankind  would  be  gathered  together  beneath  the  same  protecting 
shade.  Catholicism,  in  its  eternal  youth  and  strength,  would  rise  suddenly 
on  the  world,  and,  placing  itself  at  the  head  of  the  age,  lead  it  on  to  civiliza- 
tion and  to  happiness.  O  my  friends  1  I  feel  overcome  in  speaking  to  you  ; 
I  am  filled  with  intellectual  delight,  for  the  work  is  magnificent,  and  1  am 
young.  I  have  great  hopes,  and  I  believe  that  the  day  will  come  when  I  shall 
have  nourished  and  strengthened  my  thought,  and  shall  be  able  to  express  it 
worthily.  Yes,  the  preliminary  labors  have  already  opened  out  to  me  the  vast 
perspective  which  I  have  unfolded  to  you,  and  over  which  my  imagination 
soars  transported  with  joy.  But  it  is  a  small  thing  to  contemplate  the  career 
I  have  to  run  ;  the  thing  is  to  start  on  the  road,  for  the  hour  is  at  hand.  If  I 
nean  to  write  a  book  at  five-and-thirty,  I  must  begin  to  prepare  for  it  at 
eighteen,  for  the  preliminary  studies  are  multitudinous.  Just  see  what  an 
amount  of  study  it  involves  I  I  must  acquire  twelve  languages,  so  as  to  be  >/ 
able  to  consult  sources  and  documents.  I  must  be  fairly  master  of  geology 
and  as^ionomy,  in  order  to  discuss  the  chronological  and  cosmogonical  sys- 
•  -ms  of  peoples  and  savants.  I  must  master  universal  history  in  all  its  breadth, 
and*the  history  of  religious  crgeds  in  all  its  depth.  This  is  what  I  have  to  do 
jefore  I  arrive  at  worthily  expressing  my  idea.  I  dare  say  you  %vill  exclaim  at 
the  audacity  of  this  poor  fellow  Ozanam,  and  compare  him  to  the  frog  in  La 
Fontaine,  and  to  the  ridiculus  mus  in  Horace.  Just  as  you  like  I  I,  too,  was 
aghast  for  a  moment  at  my  own  boldness  ;  but  what  is  one  to  do  ?  WTien  af 
idea  has  taken  hold  of  you,  and  possesses  your  whole  mind  for  two  years,  are 
you  free  to  withstand  it  ?  When  a  voice  keeps  continually  crying  out  to  you, 
Do  this  ;  I  so  voillit^  can  you  bid  it  be  silent  ? 

"  Besides,  I  have  laid  my  whole  scheme  before  M.  Noirot,  who  encourages 
me  to  carry  it  out  ;  and  when  I  urged  that  perhaps  I  should  find  the  task  too 
heavy,  he  assured  me  that  I  should  meet  with  numbers  of  studious  young  men 
ready  to  assist  me  with  their  advice  and  their  labor.  And  then,  my  friends, 
I  thought  of  you." 

How  thoroughly  single-minded  Frederic  was  in  his  grand 
schemes  of  religious  championship  appears  in  many  letters  of 
the  same  date,  where  he  lays  bare  his  heart  to  the  young 
friends  whom  he  was  seeking  to  enlist  in  his  chivalrous  design. 


1 6  Life  and  Works  of  Prederic  Ozanam, 

'  Your  ideas  of  glory  are  natural  enoughrtn  a  young  man,"  he  writes  to  M. 
Falconnet,  his  cousin  ;  "  we  must  not  make  it  oui  aim,  but  accept  it  as  a  happy 
result.  Man.  loving  his  own  existence,  longs  to  perpetuate  it ;  he  lives  again 
in  his  children,  he  lives  again  in  his  works,  he  seems  to  live  again  in  the  hearts 
of  all  who  bless  his  name.  Tnie  glory  consists  in  the  gratitude  of  posterity. 
Just  as  the  righteous  man  does  not  bestow  his  gifts  to  obtain  gratitude,  yet 
nevertheless  accepts  its  tribute  with  a  sweet  sense  of  satisfaction  ;  so  should 
the  true  philosopher,  the  Christian,  never  act  in  view  of  glory,  while  at  the 
same  time  he  cannot  remain  insensible  to  it.  Hence  it  is,  that  as  ingratitude 
and  oblivion  sometimes  follow  the  greatest  benefits,  the  just  man  builds  his 
hopes  higher,  and  awaits  both  reward  and  glory  from  an  incorruptible  Judge : 
he  appeals  from  ungrateful  men  to  God,  who  never  fails." 

Ozanam  was  blessed  by  nature  with  a  singularly  contented 
disposition  as  regarded  external  circumstances,  although,  as 
we  shall  see,  his  soul  was  naturally  unquiet,  and  often 
•'  troubled  within  him." 

He  was  poor,  and  he  was  contented  to  remain  so.  There 
seldom  was  a  young  man,  conscious  of  high  intellectual  gifts, 
who  began  life  freer./rom  the  mere  ambition  of  making  money, 
and  a  position,  in  the  worldly  sense.  '*  I  often  thank  God," 
he  says,  "  for  having  placed  me  in  one  of  those  positions  on  the 
confines  of  indigence  and  independence  where  one  is  inured 
to  privations  without  being  absolutely  shut  out  from  enjoy- 
ments; where  one  runs  no  risk  of  becoming  stultified  by  the 
indulgence  of  every  wish,  and  where,  on  the  other  hand,  one 
is  not  distracted  by  the  clamorings  of  want.  God  knows 
what  a  snare  my  weak  nature  would  have  found  in  the  ener- 
vating influence  of  the  wealthy  classes,  or  in  the  sordid  pri- 
rations  of  indigence." 


CHAPTER  II. 
1831. 

Dr.  Ozanam,  who  had  cause  probably  to  realize  the  unad- 
visability  of  condemning  Frederic  any  longer  to  the  obscurity 
of  his  present  employment,  suddenly  determined  to  abridge 
the  term  of  delay,  and  sent  him  to  Paris  to  begin  his  legal 
studies  towards  the  close  of  the  year  1831,  Frederic  being  then 
in  his  eighteenth  year. 

His  first  experience  of  the  new  life,  which  had  looked  so  at- 
tractive in  the  distance,  was  anything  but  pleasant.  Paris  was 
a  very  different  place  then  from  what  it  is  now.  The  young 
Catholic  student  coming  to  Paris  now  finds  no  lack  of  centres 
where  he  can  claim  welcome  and  companionship,  and  at  once 
lose  the  sense  of  his  isolation  in  the  warmth  of  a  common 
faith  and  common  struggles.  But  it  was  not  so  just  after  the 
revolution  of  1830  had  convulsed  society  to  its  base,  and  de- 
stroyed all  cohesion.  All  who  could  leave  the  capital  had 
fled,  and  security  was  not  yet  sufficiently  re-established  to  lure 
them  back  from  the  quiet  of  the  provinces  to  a  city  which, 
then  as  now,  was  the  recognized  centre  of  disturbance  and  dis- 
order, the  hearth  from  which  the  spark  flew  to  set  the  fire 
abroad.  Parents  were  terrified  to  let  their  sons  return  to 
Lyceums  and  Colleges  where  atheism  reigned  supreme;  and, 
rather  than  expose  their  faith  to  the  risk  it  must  run  in  such 
an  atmosphere,  and  under  such  influences,  they  kept  them  at 
home,  out  of  harm's  way,  hoping  that  the  eflects  of  the  storm 
would  pass  away,  and  fairer  weather  gradually  return.  They 
began  to  perceive,  however,  tliat  this  hope,  if  it  did  not  ulti- 
mately prove  vain,  was  likely  to  be  indefinitely  deferred ;  so  it 
became  a  question  of  depriving  their  sons  of  all  liberal  educa- 

tf 


iS  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozafiam, 

tion,  and  thus  closing  the  door  of  every  honorable  career  to 
them,  or  of  sending  them  back  to  the  public  schools,  and  tak- 
ing the  consequences.  The  greater  number  were  still  hover- 
ing between  these  two  alternatives  when  Frederic  Ozanam 
came  to  Paris.  On  entering  the  classes  of  the  Ecole  de  Droit 
he  found  that  he  and  three  others  were  the  only  Christian 
students  who  attended  them. 

His  first  feeling  on  discovering  that  his  life  was  for  the  next 
few  years  to  be  cast  amongst  young  men  who  were  either 
avowed  atheists,  or  rationalists,  or  St.  Simonians,  was  a  pain- 
ful one.  Fresh  from  the  pure  atmosphere  of  a  Christian  home, 
and  animated  by  an  ardent  love  of  his  faith,  he  could  not 
bear  the  idea  of  daily  companionship  with  those  who  made 
open  profession  of  hating  Christianity,  who  scoffed  at  its 
doctrines  and  blasphemed  its  Divine  Founder.  Yet  there 
was  no  choice  between  this  and  complete  isolation,  which,  to 
a  sympathetic  nature  like  his,  seemed  unbearable ;  neverthe- 
less, he  bravely  chose  the  latter,  and  for  the  first  months  of 
his  residence  in  Paris  he  kept  aloof  from  all  intimacies,  and  as 
far  as  possible  from  all  acquaintance  with  his  fellow-students. 

He  had  at  first  not  even  the  compensation  of  a  cheerful 
fireside  to  return  to  after  his  hard  day's  work.  Madame 
Ozanam  had  deputed  an  old  friend  to  look  out  for  a  quiet 
boarding-house,  where  her  son  would  be  comfortable,  and 
where  he  would  have  some  safe  and  cheerful  society  in  the 
evenings.  The  old  friend's  choice  proved  an  unlucky  one, 
as  we  learn  from  Frederic's  first  letter  to  his  mother,  dated 
from  his  new  abode,  November  7,  1831  : 

"...  Here  I  am  alone,  without  any  amusement  or  any  sort  of  consola- 
tion. I,  so  used  to  fireside  talks,  who  took  such  pleasure  in  seeing  every  day 
around  me  those  dear  ones  who  love  me  ;  I,  so  terribly  in  need  of  advice  and 
encouragement,  behold  me  cast  unprotected,  without  a  rallying-point  of  any 
sort,  into  this  great  capital  of  egotism,  this  vortex  of  human  passions  and  er- 
rors I  The  few  young  men  whom  I  know*  are  too  far  off  for  me  to  see  them 
often.    I  have  no  one  to  pour  my  heart  out  to  but  you,  my  dearest  mother— 

*  Some  young  friends  from  Lyons,  come  to  Paris  to  study  Hke  himseli^  but  who  lived  at  the 
Mher  extremity  of  the  citf» 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  19 

f ou  and  God  .  .  . ;  but  these  two  are  all  in  all  to  me.  I  have  a  thousand 
things  to  say  to  you,  bufwhere  shall  I  begin  ?  I  am  installed,  since  Saturday, 
in  a  little  room  lc»king  to  the  south,  and  near  the  Jardin  des  Plantes.  This 
sounds  very  nice,  but  it  is  not  so  in  reality  ;  I  am  very  uncomfortable.  I  «a« 
a  long  way  off  from  the  law  schools,  the  lending  libraries,  from  the  centre  x 
my  studies,  and  my  Lyonese  friends ;  then  my  landlady  strikes  me  as  a  sly 
gossip ;  her  talk  and  her  manners  lead  me  to  suspect  that  she  looks  very  lov- 
ingly on  a  young  man's  purse.  Lastly,  and  this  is  my  chief  grievance,  the  io- 
ciety  is  not  good.  There  are  dames  and  demoiselles  boarders  also,  who  have 
their  meals  at  our  table,  who  keep  the^conversation  to  themselves,  and  whose 
tone  and  manners  are  extremely  vulgar ;  from  my  room  I  hear  them  just  now 
roaring  with  laughter  ;  they  congregate  every  evening  in  the  drawing-room 
to  play  cards,  and  pressed  me  very  much  to  join  them,  but,  as  you  may  im- 
agine, I  declined.  These  people  are  neither  Christians  nor  Turks.  I  am  the 
only  one  who  abstains* — a  circumstance  which  diverts  them  exceedingly. 
You  will  let  me  know  what  you  think  of  all  this,  and  whether  you  wish  me  to 
look  out  and  make  some  other  arrangement  for  myself." 

He  then  proceeds  to  relate  his  impressions  of  Paris : 

**  I  have  seen  the  Pantheon,  that  strange  monument,  a  pagan  temple  in 
&e  midst  of  a  city  whose  inhabitants  are  either  Christians  or  atheists;  iti 
magnificent  cupola  is  widowed  of  the  cross  that  once  crowned  it,  and  ti>e 
sombre  tint  of  its  superb  facade  indicates  an  origin  far  anterior  to  its  present 
extravagant  destination.  What  does  it  mean,  in  truth,  a  tomb  without  a 
cross,  and  a  sepulchre  where  no  religious  idea  prevails  ?  If  death  be  but  a 
material  phenomenon  that  leaves  no  hope  behind  it,  what  sense  is  tliere  in 
these  honors  rendered  to  dry  bones  and  flesh  falling  into  corruption  ?  The 
religion  of  the  Pantheon  is  nothing  but  a  comedy,  like  that  of  Reason  and 
Liberty.  But  the  people  must  have  a  faith,  and  when  the  faith  of  the  Gospel 
was  torn  from  them  there  was  nothing  for  it  but  to  fabricate  another  for 
them,  even  if  it  is  made  up  of  madness  and  imbecility 

**  I  was  amply  compensated  for  these  sad  reflections  by  the  beauty  of  the 
church  of  St.  Etienne  du  Mont,  my  parish,  the  pomp  of  its  ceremonies  and 
the  magnificence  of  the  singing  and  the  organ.  A  thrill  of  delight  ran  through 
my  whole  being  when  I  heard  that  instrument  of  a  thousand  voices  resound- 
ing beneath  the  Gothic  roof,  glorifying  God,  and  chanting  forth  His  praises, 
as  David  says,  on  the  harp  and  the  cithern,  on  flutes  and  trumpets.  How 
^reat  the  power  of  music  is,  and  how  sublime  and  beautiful  the  Catholic  faith 
that  inspires  it  I" 

The  post  did  not  travel  so  quickly  forty  years  ago  as  it 
does  nowadays,  and  before  an  answer  could  arrive  from 
Lyons  the  forlorn  student  was  rescued  from  his  uncomfort- 
able quarters  by  an  unforeseen  piece  of  good  'fortune.     He 

nut  i«,  obMTTcfl  tbe  Fridaf  fiuL 


10  Life  and  Works  of  Fredenc  Ozanam. 

had  met  once  the  celebrated  mathematician,  M.  Ampere,  at 
the  house  of  a  friend  at  Lyons,  and  taking  advantage  of  the 
great  man's  kindly  invitation  to  come  and  see  him  when  he 
came  to  Paris,  Frederic  called  upon  him  a  few  days  after  the 
date  of  the  above  letter. 

Andre  Marie  Ampere  was  a  very  great  man  indeed,  a 
member  of  the  Institute,  and  of  a  number  of  other  learned 
societies,  as  well  as  an  unrivalled  luminary  in  his  own  per- 
son ;  but  it  was  a  greatness  unalloyed  by  a  tinge  of  pedantry 
or  hauteur.  Frederic  approached  him  with  a  certam  trepi- 
dation, but  he  was  quickly  put  at  his  ease  by  the  frank  cor- 
diality of  the  untidy  old  savan^  and  before  many  minutes 
was  pouring  out  the  tale  of  his  domestic  grievances  as  to  an 
old  friend.  M.  Ampere  listened  with  attention,  then,  rising 
suddenly,  he  threw  wide  open  a  door  of  the  salon,  and  said, 
pointing  to  the  room  within,  "  Come  and  look  at  this  room, 
and  tell  me  how  you  like  it."  It  was  a  large,  comfortably 
furnished  bedroom,  looking  on  the  garden.  Frederic  replied 
that  he  liked  it  very  much.  "Then  come  and  take  possession 
of  it  J  it  is  heartily  at  your  disposal,"  said  M.  Ampere;  "you 
can  pay  me  what  you  are  paying  at  yonx pension ^  and  I  hope 
you  will  be  better  off;  you  will  make  the  acquaintance  of  my 
son,*  who  is  occupied  studying  German  literature;  his  li- 
brary meantime  is  at  your  disposal ;  you  abstain,  so  do  we ; 
my  sister  and  my  daughter  dine  with  us;  that  will  be  a  little 
society  for  you.     What  do  you  say  to  the  plan  ?  " 

Frederic  said  it  was  almost  too  delightful  to  be  real,  and 
that  he  would  write  at  once  to  his  father  about  it.  The  reply 
was  such  as  might  have  been  anticipated  ;  and  a  month  later 
the  student  writes  home  in  high  spirits,  describing  his  new 
manner  of  life,  and  enclosing  a  plan  of  his  room,  with  its  fur- 
niture and  ornaments,  for  his  mother. 

"You  will  all  laugh,"  he  says,  "but  I  am  sure  the  scrawl  will  amuse 
mamma ;  she  can  now  fancy  me  seated  at  my  table,  getting  into  bed,  going 
from  my  table  to  fetch  a  block  of  wood,  and  putting  it  into  my  stove  I 

Then  »1>sent  »t »  C«miw>  University;  this  rooin.'waiithe  one  )ip  occupied  when  at  home* 


Ufiand  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  %% 

We  breakfast  at  ten,  and  dine  at  half-past  five,  all  together— M.  Amp^. 
his  daughter  and  sister.  M.  Amp>ere  talks  a  good  deal,  and  his  conversation 
is  amusing  and  always  instructive  ;  since  I  have  been  here  (two  days),  I  have 
already  learned  many  things  from  him.  His  daughter  talks  cleverly,  and  takes 
part  in  all  that  is  said  ;  M.  Ampere  is  very  caressing  in  his  manner  to  her,  but 
he  never  speaks  to  her  about  anything  but  science.  He  has  a  prodigious 
memory  for  everything  scientific,  in  every  conceivable  department  of  know- 
ledge, but  he  never  remembers  anything  connected  with  the  manage.  He 
learned  Latin  all  by  himself,  and  began  to  vrrite  Latir  verses  only  two  years 
ago,  and  does  it  remarkably  well.  He  has  a  wonderful  knowledge  of  history, 
and  reads  a  dissertation  on  the  hieroglyphics  with  as  much  pleasure  as  a  de- 
scription of  some  experiment  in  physics  and  natural  history.  All  this  comes 
to  him  like  intuition.  The  discoveries  which  have  raised  him  to  the  pinnacle 
where  he  stands  to-day  came  to  him  all  at  once,  he  telN  me.  He  is  just  now 
finishing  a  grand  plan  for  an  Encyclopaedia.  Are  you  not  glad,  my  dear 
father,  to  have  me  under  the  roof  of  this  kind  and  excellent  man  ?  I  forgot 
to  tell  you  that  the  most  perfect  politeness  reigns  in  the  family.  I  also  forgot 
to  give  you  my  address ;  here  it  is— 19  Rue  des  Fosses  St.  Victor." 

His  residence  with  M.  Ampere  brought  Frederic  into  con- 
tact with  the  most  distinguished  men  of  science  and  letters  of 
the  day;  they  all  seem  to  have  treated  the  modest  young  stu- 
dent with  a  kindness  and  condescension  which  charmed  him. 

•*  All  these  savants  of  Paris  are  full  of  affability,"  he  informs  his  mother. 
**  Yesterday  I  saw  M.  Serullas,*  a  most  worthy  man,  gifted  in  the  highest 
degree  with  scientific  absence  of  mind.  I  found  him  In  the  mvdst  of  some 
chemical  manipulations,  which  he  took  care  not  to  interrupt  while  receiving 
me  very  graciously,  and  treating  me  every  now  and  then,  as  he  said,  to  an 
explosion  of  fragments  of  potassium  ;  but  he  was  not  in  tune,  his  exoertnents 
were  not  successful.  It  is  surprising  how  learned  everybody  is  here  I  You 
see  I  have  turned  optimist ;  in  my  last  letter  I  was  a  pessimist,  because  I  was 
worried  ;  everything  seemed  to  me  to  be  going  wrong.  BuT  now  that  things 
are  quiet  at  Lyons,  and  that  I  have  society  and  a  room  to  my  fancy,  and  the 
prospect  of  books  and  fire  and  money — what  more  can  I  want  ?  You,  my  dear 
father,  you,  and  all  my  family  ;  oh  I  that  is  what  I  still  want,  and  what  I  long 
ardently  for.  What  a  happiness  it  will  be  to  embrace  70U  in  eight  months 
from  this  I " 

Amongst  the  celebrities  whom  Frederic  always  reckoned  jt  a 

privilege  to  have  come  in  contact  with  at  this  period  of  his 

/  life,  was  M.  de  Chdteaubriand.     He  had  been  furn'shed  with 

a  letter  of  introduction  to  the  great  man  on  coming  to  Paris, 

but  he  kept  it  nearly  two  months  before  he  had  the  courage 

*  Proreaaor  of  CbcmMtrf  at  V«l-<|»^r«e». 


tS  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

to  present  it.  At  last,  on  New  Year's  Da)^  he  put  it  m  his 
pocket  and  sallied  forth  before  twelve  o'clock,  determined  to 
take  the  desperate  step.  His  heart  beat  violently  as  he  rang 
at  the  door  of  the  man  whom  Charles  the  Tenth  had  called 
*•  one  of  the  powers  of  this  world."  M,  de  Chateaubriand 
had  just  come  in  from  mass ;  he  received  his  timid  visitor 
with  the  most  winning  grace,  questioned  him  with  lively  in- 
terest concerning  his  studies,  his  tastes,  his  future  plans  and 
prospects;  then,  fixing  a  peculiar  look  on  him,  he  enquired 
whether  he  had  yet  been  to  any  of  the  theatres.  Frederic 
replied  that  he  had  not.  "  And  do  you  intend  to  go  ?  "  asked 
M.  de  Chateaubriand,  with  his  eye  sull  bent  on  him.  Fre- 
deric hesitated  for  a  moment;  he  had  promised  his  mother 
not  to  go,  and  he  never  dreamed  of  breaking  his  word,  but  he 
was  afraid  of  appearing  ridiculous  in  the  eyes  of  the  great 
poet  if  he  confessed  this ;  the  struggle,  however,  was  brief; 
he  replied  frankly  that  he  had  resolved  never  to  put  his  foot 
inside  a  theatre,  and  why.  A  beam  of  satisfaction  lighted 
up  M.  de  Chateaubriand's  face,  and  stooping  forward  he 
embraced  the  young  man  with  emotion.  "  I  implore  you  to 
»y  be  true  to  that  promise  to  your  mother,'*  he  said.  "You 
would  gain  nothing  at  the  theatre,  and  you  might  lose  a  great 
deal." 

Frederic  counted  this  little  episode  amongst  the  many  sig- 
nal kindnesses  which  Providence  placed  in  his  path  at  the 
perilous  moment  of  his  dibut  in  Paris.  Henceforth,  when  any 
of  his  freethinking  companions  proposed  his  accompanying 
them  to  the  play,  he  would  answer  boldly,  and  without  fear 
of  ridicule,  **  M.  de  Chateaubriand  advised  me  strongly  not 
to  go,  and  I  promised  him  I  would  not." 

■But  indeed  from  the  day  he  entered  on  his  studies  in  Paris, 
his  time  was  so  completely  filled  up  that  there  was  little  mar- 
gin left  for  such  amusements,  had  he  been  inclined  for  them. 
He  worked  all  day,  and  continued  to  encroach  frequently  on 
his  night's  rest,  to  prepare  the  labors  of  the  morrow.  More- 
over, the  drean>  which  ha4  illuminate']  the  dusky  precincts  of 


JUfe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  aj 

fV>e  attorney's  office  for  nearly  a  year  was  still  dominant  in 
his  mind,  guiding  all  his  efforts,  overshadowing  all  minor  am- 
bitions :  the  desire  to  do  something,  to  help  in  doing  some- 
thing, for  God  and  his  fellow-creatures.  This  was  the  aim 
of  all  his  studies — to  fit  himself  for  some  mission  of  usefulness, 
to  whose  success  his  personal  interest  and  success  as  a  stu- 
dent, or  even  later  as  a  barrister,  must  remain  absolutely  sub- 
ordinate. No  wonder  that  these  lofty  aspirations  and  deep 
musings  engendered  a  sort  of  tender  melancholy  in  his  ardent 
soul,  compressed  as  he  was  by  circumstances  so  little  favor- 
able to  his  wide  humanitarian  ambitions.  He  writes  to  Fal- 
connet: 

'« I  have  been  here  now  a  fortnight  in  possession  of  a  charming  room,  with  a 
hospitable  table,  pleasant  society,  and  the  conversation  of  my  host,  which  is  al- 
ways instructive,  and  often  amusing ;  one  class  of  law  and  two  of  literature  a 
day  ;  the  frequent  society  of  Henri.*  Surely  this  is  more  than  enough  to 
make  a  student's  life  happy  !  and  yet— if  you  tliink  I  am  happy  you  are  mis- 
taken. I  am  not  happy  ;  I  am  conscious  of  an  immense  void,  an  indescriba- 
ble tnalaise.  ...  I  dislike  Paris  because  there  is  no  life  here,  no  faith,  no 
love ;  it  is  like  a  huge  corpse  to  which  my  youth  is  chained  alive,  and  whose 
icy  coldness  freezes  while  its  corruption  poisons  me.  It  is  in  the  midst  of  this 
moral  desert  that  one  understands  fully  and  repeats  ardently  that  cry  of  the 
Psalmist : 

*  Habitavi  cum  habitantibus  Cedar,  multum  incola  fuit  anima  mea  I 
Si  oblitus  fuero  tui,  Jerusalem,  adhaereat  lingua  mea  faucibus  meis  P 

"These  accents  of  immortal  poetry  resound  often  in  my  soul;  this  vast 
city  where  I  am,  as  it  were,  lost,  is  to  me  Kedar,  Babylon,  the  land  of  exile 
and  pilgrimage,  while  Sion  is  my  native  town,  with  its  provincial  simplicity, 
the  charity  of  its  inhabitants,  its  altars  erect,  and  its  faith  respected.  Science 
and  Catholicism  are  my  only  consolations,  and  assuredly  they  are  noble  ones ; 
but  here  also  I  find  hopes  deceived,  obstacles  to  be  overcome,  difficulties  to 
be  conquered.  You  know  of  old  my  longing  to  surround  myself  with  young 
men  feeling  and  thinking  as  I  do  ;  I  know  that  there  are  such,  many  such,  but 
they  are  scattered  ^  like  gold  on  the  dunghill,^  and  the  task  of  gathering  de- 
fenders under  one  flag  is  proverbially  a  difficult  one.  I  hope  nevertheless, 
in  one  of  my  next  letters,  to  be  able  to  give  you  some  more  definite  hopes 
on  this  head. 

*•  How  do  we  stand  at  present  regarding  scientific  ideas  ?  what  is  the  po8i« 
tion  of  the  schools,  the  belligerent  powers  in  the  field  of  philosophy  ? 

"  We  must  first  consider  that  after  all  our  disputes  and  struggles,  after  all 

*  Henri  Pessonncaux,  his  cousin,  a  young  man  of  high  mc-al  and  inteUectual  eadownients.«ai 
4evotedl7  attached  to  Frederic 


24  Lifi  ^f^^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

partial  problems,  a  moment  must  come  when  reason  sums  up  all  her  doubts  !nta 
one,  and  proposes  the  grand  general  problem.  In  our  day  this  problem  may  bt 
thus  expressed,  What  was  man  made  for  ?  What  the  aim  and  the  law  of  hu- 
manity ?  Considered  with  regard  to  the  past  century,  there  is  progress,  since  the 
very  terms  of  the  problem  imply  the  existence  of  a  providence,  an  aim,  a  crea- 
tive and  conservative  idea.  The  question  at  this  stage  appeals  for  its  solution 
to  philosophy  and  history.  You  can  understand  the  immense  importance  at- 
tached in  these  days  to  historical  studies.  Up  to  this  point  everybody  is 
agreed  ;  but  here  they  split,  the  division  being  caused  by  the  very  premises  of 
the  question.  One  side  takes  psychology  as  the  basis  of  its  researches,  and  builds 
up  to  itself  a  sort  of  abstract  man  after  the  fashion  of  Condillac's  statue.  In 
this  man  it  sees  all  it  wishes  to  see,  and  hence  deduces  a  philosophical  for- 
mula on  which  it  spreads  out  history  as  on  a  sort  of  Procrustes-bed,  cutting 
and  hacking  all  that  has  any  difficulty  in  fitting  into  its  inflexible  frame. 
These  people,  who  are  but  following  after  Rousseau,  Dupuys,  and  Volney, 
have  lighted  on  the  admirable  discovery  that  all  religions  began  with  fetichism, 
and  they  go  about  proclaiming  it  to  whoever  has  ears  to  hear,  holding  forth 
about  the  law  of  progress,  the  extinction  of  Christianity,  and  the  approaching 
advent  of  a  new  religion.  This  is  what  Professor  Jouffroy  preached  to  us  only 
the  other  day  at  the  Sorbonne,  that  ancient  Sorbonne  which  was  founded  by 
Christianity,  and  whose  dome  is  still  crowned  with  the  sign  of  the  Cross. 

"  But  in  opposition  to  this  school,  which  calls  itself  the  Rationalistic,  an- 
other has  sprung  up  by  the  name  of  the  Traditional,  not  because  it  has  repu- 
diated reason,, but  because  history  is  the  groundwork  and  tradition  the  start- 
ing-point of  its  system.  In  its  ranks  are  enrolled  MM.  de  Chateaubriand,  de 
Lamennais,  d'Ekstein,  Ballanche,  de  Donald  ;  and  in  Germany,  Schlegel, 
Baader,  Stolberg,  Goerres.  They  distinguish  two  aims  of  human  knowledge, 
the  finite  and  the  infinite,  philosophical  truth  and  religious  truth  ;  two  ways 
of  knowing,  reason  and  belief,  analysis  and  synthesis,  or  perhaps,  as  the 
Church  defines  it,  the  order  of  nature  and  the  order  of  grace.  Now,  the  finite 
is  pressed  upon  all  sides  by  the  infinite  ;  the  infinite  is  God,  the  Alpha  and 
;he  Omega,  the  beginning  and  the  end.  Hence  it  follows  that  synthesis  is 
at  once  the  basis  and  the  crown  of  humanity,  and  that  religious  truth  is  the 
source  and  final  end  of  philosophical  truth.  From  these  premises  there  springs 
up  a  vast  theory  concerning  the  relations  of  science  and  faith,  and  a  wide  ex- 
planation of  history.  And  as  synthesis  is  the  primitive  fact  which  precedes 
all  knowledge,  it  follows  that  psychology  is  incapable  of  sounding  the  depth 
of  nature,  or  grasping  her  breadth.  It  is  therefore  in  history  that  we  must 
pursue  our  researches  and  our  study  of  her  ;  it  is  history  which  must  tell  us 
the  history  of  mankind.  They  assert,  moreover,  that  fetichism,  far  from  being 
the  first  step  of  humanity,  is  the  last  degree  of  corruption  ;  that  souvenirs  of 
the  age  of  gold,  and  of  the  first  fault,  and  of  expiation  by  blood,  are  sown 
everywhere  amongst  the  peoples.  This  is  their  theor>'.  Meantime  our  work 
is  maturing  in  the  young  Catholic  minds,  and  will  appear  in  its  fulness  at 
the  appointed  time.  Never  wa?  a  history  of  human  religion  more  imperative- 
ly called  for  by  social  needs. 

*♦  Temfu^erit.  .  ,  ," 


CHAPTER  111 

183.. 

In  order  to  understand  the  social  conditions  which  Ozanaro 
describes,  and  which  stirred  him  to  such  dismay  and  com- 
passion, it  is  necessary  that  we  should  glance  back  to  the 
opening  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  realize  what  was  the 
state  of  religious  feeling  in  France  just  after  the  Revolution  had 
subsided,  and  left  the  country  still  heaving  from  the  storm 
which  had  uprooted  all  her  old  beliefs  and  traditions,  and 
overturned  her  civil  and  religious  institutions,  and  built  up  out 
of  these  ruins  an  edifice  of  order,  where  the  first  essential  ele- 
ment of  order  was  wanting. 

When  Napoleon  came  and  took  the  destinies  of  France  in 
hand,  religion,  in  so  far  as  the  state  and  the  nation  at  large 
were  concerned,  had  ceased  to  exist ;  it  was  practically  abol- 
ished ;  its  temples  were  turned  into  stables  and  warehouses,  or 
else  profaned  by  monstrous  rites  and  revolting  orgies,  m  the 
name  of  the  goddess  Reason  ;  no  external  sign  bore  witness 
to  any  covenant  between  heaven  and  earth ;  there  was  no  re- 
ligious instruction  to  be  had  anywhere ;  children  grew  up  like 
animals  without  souls;  the  remnants  of  the  clergy  were  scat- 
tered through  the  provinces,  officiating  in  holes  and  comers, 
hiding  from  the  hostile  and  ubiquitous  police  of  the  republic, 
mistrusting  as  spies  those  who  came  furtively  to  implore  their 
ministry ;  a  certain  number  of  constitutional  priests  in  Paris 
were  feebly  attempting  to  blow  a  spark  from  the  cold  ashes 
of  a  Church  pulverized  by  the  Revolution.  There  were  still, 
no  doubt,  noble  examples  of  fidelity  to  the  faith  to  be  found 
throughout  the  country,  but  these  were  exceptions  to  the 
general  rule  of  atheism  and  freethinking.     The  Church  had 


26  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

fallen  into  contempt  long  before  contempt  had  translatea 
itself  into  the  active  hostility  and  open  violence  (5f  the  Revo- 
lution. The  Church — or  what  has  in  all  ages  been  identified 
with  her,  for  glory  or  for  shame,  the  clergy — had  lost  her 
hold  upon  public  esteem.  There  were  saints  amongst  them 
m  tnose  days,  as  there  always  have  been,  but  there  was,  on 
the  surface,  a  class  of  men,  such  as  the  abb^s  de  cour^  who,  by 
their  crimes  and  follies,  had  become  identified  with  the  rigimi 
whose  corruption  eventually  brought  about  its  own  downfall, 
dragging  the  Church  with  it,  and  shattering  the  sacred  edifice 
so  terribly  that,  to  human  eyes,  the  ruin  of  the  altar  seemed 
as  complete  and  irreparable  as  the  ruin  of  the  throne.  Even 
those  who  believed  in  the  immortality  of  the  Church  herself 
confessed,  with  sorrow,  that  in  France  her  reign  was  over. 
The  admission,  sad  as  it  was,  implied  no  disloyalty  towards 
the  faith.  Faith  can  never  die ;  the  Word  of  God  is  immortal, 
but  no  particular  spots  on  earth  have  been  assigned  as  its 
dwelling-place,  or  the  shrine  of  its  eternal  presence.  Africa 
had  held  it  once,  and  so  had  Antioch  and  Jerusalem  and  Con- 
stantinople ;  but  a  time  came  when  the  divine  guest  passed 
away  from  these  lands,  the  current  of  the  stream  was  turned 
aside,  and  mysteriously  diverted  into  other  channels.  Had 
the  time  come  when  France,  so  long  the  fountain  of  Christian- 
ity, was  to  see  the  waters  flow  out  of  her  midst,  and  depart 
irrevocably  to  fertilize  distant  and  more  faithful  lands  ?  The 
history  of  other  peoples  was  there  to  show  a  precedent  for 
this  dispensation,  and  there  were  few  signs  to  bid  the  most 
sanguine  hope  that  the  kingdom  of  Clovis  and  St.  Louis  was 
not  doomed  to  share  the  fate  which  had  overtaken  the  coun- 
try of  St.  Augustine. 

There  was  one  man,  one  only,  in  whose  hands,  as  far  as 
human  judgment  could  see,  the  power  was  vested  of  averting 
the  final  catastrophe;  but  he  was  abroad,  busy  with  other 
conquests  than  those  of  the  kingdom  which  is  not  of  this 
world.  He  was  destroying  the  armies  of  Europe,  overturn- 
ing thrones,  keeping  the  eyes  of  all  nations  fixed  on  hira  with 


lAff  and  Worki  of  Fi'ederic  Ozanam.  27 

terror  and  amazement.  France  looked  on  in  wild  exultation  ; 
everything  connected  with  her  brilliant  young  hero  partook 
of  the  character  of  a  gigantic  legend;  popular  enthusiasm 
clotlied  him  with  the  prestige  of  a  demigod.  No  conqueror 
ever  returned  to  his  native  country  armed  with  a  mightier 
power  over  her  destinies  for  good  or  for  evil  than  Napoleon 
after  the  campaigns  of  Egypt  and  Italy.  Those  who  knew 
him  best  could  hardly  hope  that  he  would  use  it  well ;  that  is 
to  say,  nobly,  disinterestedly,  patriotically,  like  a  man  who 
loses  sight  of  himself  and  his  personal  ambitions  in  the  pco 
found  sense  of  the  responsibility  of  his  mission.  Except  to 
those  immediately  about  him,  little  was  known  in  France  of 
Napoleon's  character  and  opinions  beyond  that  he  was  a 
republican  and  a  great  military  commander ;  the  official  re- 
ports of  his  harangues  and  proclamations  which  appeared  in 
the  Moniteur  were  not  full  or  honest  enough  to  reveal  him  to 
the  public  at  home  as  he  was  known  to  his  generals  and  the 
army.  It  was  not  known,  for  instance,  that  he  boasted  loud- 
ly in  the  East  of  having  **  overturned  the  cross  " ;  or  that  in 
addressing  the  Arabs  he  had  said,  '*  We  also  are  true  Mussul- 
mans. Have  we  not  destroyed  the  Pope,  who  wanted  us  to 
declare  war  against  the  Mussulmans  ?  "  *  But  it  was  known 
and  remembered  by  many,  that  a  year  before,  in  his  speech 
at  the  Luxembourg,  he  had  declared  "  religion  to  be  one  of 
those  prejudices  which  the  French  people  had  yet  to  over- 
come" (Christmas,  1797).  Almost  anything  might  be  expect- 
ed from  so  elastic  a  believer;  but  no  one  was  prepared  for 
what  really  did  come. 

On  the  1 8th  of  June,  i8oo,  four  days  after  the  battle  of 
Marengo,  Napoleon  assisted  publicly  at  a  solemn  Te  Deum 
in  the  cathedral  of  Milan,  and  on  coming  out  observed 
jocosely  to  his  staff,  that  '*  the  atheists  of  Paris  would  be  furi- 
ous when  they  heard  of  it.'*     And  he  said  truly;  they  were. 

A  priest  named  the  Abb6  Fournier  f  was  one  of  the  first  to 

*  Manifesto  of  July  %,  179B. 

t  Sea  introduction  to  Concordat  \r§  rattaUk 


i8  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

hear  of  the  extraordinary  occurrence,  and,  in  a  sermon  which 
he  preached  the  next  day  at  St.  Roch,  he  announced  it  to  his 
audience  in  an  impassioned  and  picturesque  form ;  he  evoked 
the  image  of  a  young  hero,  who,  after  gathering  glory  on  a 
thousand  battle-fields,  was  suddenly  overpowered  by  a  sense 
of  gratitude  to  the  God  of  armies,  and  flew  publicly  to  invoke 
His  blessing  on  France  and  the  victorious  soldiers  who  were 
about  to  return  to  her. 

The  republic  was  so  shocked  at  the  scandalous  libel,  that 
the  Abb6  Fournier  was  immediately  arrested  as  a  madman, 
carried  off  to  the  lunatic  asylum  of  Charenton,  dressed  in  the 
humiliating  costume  of  its  inmates,  and  locked  up. 

It  required  the  influence  of  several  statesmen,  including 
Portalis,  to  obtain  his  deliverance  after  eight  days'  detention. 
Meantime  the  truth  of  the  supposed  libel  had  travelled  to 
Paris;  four  months  later  the  Abbe  Fournier  was  named  a 
bishop,  and  about  a  year  later  the  Concordat  was  signed. 

This  great  transaction,  which  M.  Thiers  speaks  of  as  "  the 
most  important  which  the  Court  of  Rome  ever  concluded 
with  France,  perhaps  with  any  Christian  power,"  and  which, 
if  we  are  to  believe  the  Abb6  Pradt,  Napoleon  often  spoke  of 
as  the  greatest  mistake  of  his  reign,*  gave  almost  universal 
dissatisfaction  to  the  French  people.  The  republicans  were 
furious,  because  the  re-establishment  of  the  Church  was  like 
the  triumph  of  royalism,  and  the  defeat  and  humiliation  of 
the  Revolution. 

The  royalists  were  angry,  because  the  Concordat  robbed 
them  of  their  chief  grievance,  and  broke  the  strongest  weapon 
in  their  hand ;  hitherto  the  cause  of  royalty  had  been  synony- 
mous with  that  of  the  Church,  henceforth  it  ceased  to  be  so. 

The  philosophers  were  indignant,  because  it  belied  their 
triumphant  prophecies  concerning  the  death  of  Christianity, 
and  its  final  burial  under  the  reign  of  atheism  and  reason. 

The  Constitutional  clergy  f  were  angry,  because  it  placed 

*  Le«  quatre  Coooordata. 

t  Tktae  who  took  the  oath  \a  the  Civil 


Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederu  Ozanam,  19 

Ihcm  in  a  false  position ;  the  rank  they  held  from  the  Revo- 
lution was  now  compromised,  perhaps  nullified. 

The  faithful  clergy,  who  might  have  had  real  grounds  foi 
rejoicing,  were  afraid  to  do  so;  they  dared  not  trust  the 
treaty ;  it  might  prove  after  all  but  an  exchange  of  bondage. 
Time  showed  how  much  sagacity  there  was  in  this  instinctive 
mistrust,  which  at  the  moment  was  regarded  as  treasonable 
by  the  suggesters  of  the  new  treaty. 

Few  measures,  perhaps,  have  been  more  diversely  judged 
by  history  than  this  of  the  Concordat.  The  enemies  of  Na- 
poleon ridicule  and  condemn  it  as  an  elaborate  piece  of 
hypocrisy,  while  his  admirers  extol  it  as  the  wisest  and  grand- 
est achievement  of  his  reign.  It  was  undeniably  an  admira- 
ble piece  of  statecraft;  a  measure  of  policy  worthy  of  the 
deep  and  lofty  mind  that  compiled  the  Code  Napol6on. 

We  have  no  reason  to  believe  that  Napoleon  was  actuated 
by  higher  motives,  by  respect  for  the  Church,  and  belief  in 
her  supernatural  vitahty ;  but  his  actions  proved  on  many  oc- 
casions that  he  was  not  devoid  of  the  religious  sense,  although 
it  may  not  have  carried  him  beyond  a  certain  instinctive 
superstition.  On  the  other  hand,  his  knowledge  of  human 
nature  and  of  the  history  of  mankind  taught  him  to  recognize 
the  absolute  necessity  of  a  Church  of  some  sort  in  every  State, 
of  an  altar  where  the  people  could  meet  and  worship,  a  God 
whom,  if  they  did  not  love,  they  would  at  least  fear,  and  who 
would  serve  the  purposes  of  state  by  constituting  a  kind  of 
supreme  court  of  appeal,  whose  tribunal,  having  its  seat  in 
the  conscience  of  the  citizen,  would  facilitate  the  exercise  of 
the  law,  and  bring  its  influence  to  bear  on  the  governed  and 
the  governing  alike.  Starting  from  this  general  principle, 
Napoleon  was,  moreover,  clear-sighted  enough  to  discern  the 
radical  Catholicism  of  France,  and  to  see  that  no  other  re- 
ligion could  ever  supply  or  supplant  the  old  one  in  the  heart 
of  the  people.  "  Ninety-three  "  had  done  its  best,  and  that 
best  had  been  terrible,  but  it  had  not  succeeded  in  crushing 
the  seeds  of  Catholicism  out  of  the  soil,  so  as  to  leave  it 


30  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

ready  for  the  sowing  of  a  new  faith  j  the  Cathoh'c  Church, 
despised,  decimated,  downtrodden  as  she  was,  had  still  an 
inalienable  hold  on  the  hearts  and  consciences  of  the  people ; 
she  was  still,  therefore,  a  power  to  be  reckoned  with,  and  it 
is  to  the  credit  of  the  legislator's  genius  at  least  that,  sur- 
rounded as  he  was  by  atheists  and  scoffers,  and  himself  per- 
sonally careless  enough  on  the  score  of  religion,  he  saw  and 
acknowledged  this  fact.  Unbelief  was  rampant  in  all  classes, 
more  especially  in  the  educated  ones,  but  Napoleon  was  not 
deceived  by  this  surface  aspect  of  the  national  mind.  Since 
the  State  must  have  a  religion,  that  religion  could  be  no 
other  than  the  Catholic. 

The  Concordat  of  1801  was  the  practical  expression  of  this 
belief.  Napoleon  was  never  a  devout,  perhaps  not  even  a 
sincere.  Catholic,  but  he  never  failed  to  exhibit  in  public  re- 
spect for  the  religion  he  professed ;  he  upheld  it  as  a  necessary 
element  in  good  and  sound  government ;  he  regarded  it  as 
the  most  valuable  police  a  nation  can  maintain,  an  institu- 
tion not  to  be  served  by,  but  to  serve,  the  State.  His  subse- 
quent conduct  towards  the  Holy  See  was  quite  consistent  with 
these  opinions,  was  in  fact  their  logical  outcome.  The  official 
history  of  the  Concordat,  and  the  correspondence  between  its 
author  and  Portalis  connected  with  its  execution,  attests  at 
every  page  that,  as  First  Consul  and  as  Emperor,  Napoleon 
regarded  the  clergy  and  the  hierarchy  very  much  in  the  light 
of  a  body-guard  of  soldiers  and  mayors;  the  bishops,  "my 
bishops,"  were  so  many  mitred  prefects  in  command  of  an 
army  of  minor  functionaries — the  priests — with  a  Minister  of 
Public  Worship  holding  command  over  all.  A  sous-prdfei 
under  the  second  Empire  was  a  more  independent  personage 
than  a  bishop  under  the  first.  The  latter  could  not  leave  his 
diocese  for  a  day  without  permission  from  the  Minister  of 
Public  Worship,  who  could  not  grant  it  without  the  authoriza- 
tion of  the  First  Consul.  The  Bishop  of  Meaux,  the  succes- 
sor of  Bossuet,  was  suffering  from  a  severe  attack  of  ophthal- 
mia, and  had  to  wait  some  time  for  \eave  to  go  to  Paris  for 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  31 

medical  assistance;  it  came  at  last  direct  from  Napoleon 
himself,  and  coupled  with  an  injunction  that  the  bishop  should 
**  occupy  himself  diligently  with  the  affairs  of  his  diocese 
while  in  Paris." 

The  same  petty  despotism  was  exercised,  as  far  as  possible, 
towards  the  Holy  See.  No  decree  of  the  Sovereign  Pontiff 
was  valid,  or  even  made  public,  until  it  had  received  the 
sanction  of  the  Government — a  system  which  placed  the  clergy 
in  the  constant  dilemma  of  having  to  choose  between  obedi- 
ence to  the  Church  and  the  mandates  of  the  Pope,  and  their 
allegiance  as  citizens  to  tlie  civil  power.  Such  a  state  of  things 
was  calculated  to  test  severely  the  mettle  of  the  ecclesiastical 
body,  and  it  must  be  said  to  their  honor  that,  as  a  body,  they 
came  nobly  out  of  the  ordeal.  Not  a  few  were  found  who 
rendered  to  Caesar  more  than  Caesar's  due,  but  the  great  ma- 
jority contrived  to  ally  prudence  with  becoming  independence 
and  to  maintain  the  dignity  of  their  sacred  character  intact. 
We  must  bear  in  mind,  in  order  to  appreciate  this  fact  as  it 
deserves,  that  it  was  long  since  the  political  and  social  state 
of  France  had  been  favorable  to  the  growth  of  dignity  and  in- 
dependence, or  to  the  formation  of  manliness  of  character. 
The  reign  of  Louis  XV.  had  not  been  a  school  for  confessors, 
though  the  timid  priesthood  of  that  dissolute  reign  would  no 
doubt  have  furnished  its  contingent  of  martyrs  had  they  been 
called  for  tlien,  as  they  were  later  by  the  Revolution.  Na- 
poleon, on  his  advent  to  power,  found  a  clergy  who  had  been 
inured  to  suffer  and  trained  to  die,  but  who  had  lost  the  art 
of  fighting.  His  quick  sagacity  detected  the  weak  point  in 
the  shield,  and  hit  there.  He  began  by  professing  unqualified 
respect  for  the  doctrines  of  the  Church,  guessing  well  that  if  he 
had  laid  the  tip  of  his  finger  on  that  sacred  deposit  the  bishops 
would  have  defied  him,  and  laid  their  heads  on  the  block 
rather  than  capitulate  on  the  smallest  point ;  but  when  he  is- 
sued a  decree  ordering  them  to  send  in  their  pastorals  to  be 
overlooked  by  the  prefect  before  being  read  to  their  fiocks,  it 
never  entered  their  heads  to  demur;  at  any  rate  they  did  not, 


y 


52  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

although  the  tyranny  was  the  more  absurd  and  offensive  from 
the  fact  of  the  prefect  being  frequently  a  Protestant,  and  still 
oftener  an  athiest.  The  decree  continued  in  force  all  through 
the  Consulate  and  under  the  Empire.* 

Minute  and  stringent  laws  were  enacted  concerning  reli- 
gious institutions.  No  community  of  men  or  women,  whether 
for  prayer,  teaching,  or  the  service  of  the  sick  and  poor,  could 
be  opened  in  France  until  the  rules  and  statutes  of  the  order 
had  been  investigated  and  endorsed  by  Napoleon  and  Porta- 
lis ;  and  there  is  something  cynically  comic  in  the  way  the 
latter,  in  his  reports  to  the  Emperor,  discusses  the  purpose, 
organization,  utility,  and  dangers  of  the  religious  life,  the  first 
elements  of  which  were  as  familiar  to  him  probably  as  the 
household  arrangements  of  the  Grand  Lama. 

The  Press,  that  other  powerful  engine  in  the  State,  was  not 
3ikely  to  be  allowed  more  liberty  than  the  Church.  It  was 
gagged,  and  became  a  mere  tool  in  the  hands  of  the  Gov- 
ernment. The  few  journalists  who  refused  the  general  tribute 
of  flattery  and  obsequiousness  were  dismissed  from  their  posts, 
their  journals  were  suppressed  or  given  into  other  hands. 

The  department  of  Public  Instruction  remained  next  to  be 
dealt  with,  and  nothing  could  be  more  summary  than  the  way 
in  which  it  was  done.  Every  vestige  of  liberty  which  the 
Revolution  had  spared  was  swept  away.  Under  the  Revolu- 
tion and  the  Consulate  the  rights  of  parents  at  least  were 
respected ;  the  State  opened  schools,  but  it  left  parents  free 
to  send  their  children  there  or  not;  secular  and  religious 
schools  had  fair  play  from  the  Government,  and  were  not 
interfered  with.f  With  the  Empire  all  this  was  changed. 
Liberty  of  teaching  was  so  completely  abolished  that  the 
right  of  opening  a  school  of  any  description,  for  any  class  of 
scholars,  became  the  exclusive  monopoly  of  the  State.  The 
Imperial  University  was  founded,  and  replaced  all  previous 
institutions  of  the  sort.     Christian  parents  had  to  choose  be- 

*  L'Bglis*  Samaitu  tt  Ufrtmitr  Sm^,  par  M.  d'HauMoorille,  t.  t.  pjk  vi^-wgt 
t  See  Foiuet's  Lift  of  Lattrdair*,  vol.  i. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  33 

tween  the  privation  of  all  education  for  their  sons,  or  the 
almost  certain  ruin  of  their  faith  ;  as  a  rule  they  adopted  the 
latter,  and  generally  with  the  result  foreseen.  Let  home  train- 
ing be  ever  so  careful,  it  could  not  be  expected  to  resist  the 
influence  of  the  majority,  of  those  imperious  and  sympathetic 
tyrants,  companions  of  their  own  age,  who  so  powerfully  sup- 
plemented the  teaching,  direct  and  indirect,  of  Professors  for 
the  most  part  infidels,  and,  at  any  rate,  always  chosen  with- 
out the  slightest  regard  to  their  religious  principles. 

Such  a  system  of  education  was  in  truth  a  sort  of  conscrip- 
tion of  souls,  as  arbitrary  and  far  more  fatal  than  those  lev/es 
en  masse  which  the  great  captain  was  accustomed  to  raise  for 
the  maintenance  of  his  armies.  The  only  possible  remedy 
for  such  a  state  of  things  would  have  been  free  competition, 
and  this  was  rigorously  proscribed.  By  a  decree  of  1809,  the 
most  obscure  village  school  was  compelled  to  choose  between 
suppression,  or  the  official  badge  of  the  imperial  schoolmas- 
ter. The  letters  of  M.  de  Lamennais  to  Brut6  show  us  what 
a  superfluity  of  zeal  the  Government  thought  it  worth  while 
:o  expend  on  hunting  down  a  few  humble  village  priests  who 
ventured  to  help  some  young  Breton  peasants  in  preparing 
for  the  seminary  by  teaching  them  the  rudiments  of  Latin. 
These  very  seminaries,  which  the  charity  of  the  Church 
opened  to  this  humble  class  of  students,  were  placed  under 
the  control  of  the  Imperial  University,  whose  authority  de- 
cided the  choice  of  the  masters,  and  obliged  the  scholars  to 
follow  the  classes  of  the  infidel  Lyceums  and  Colleges. 

The  Empire  went  further  still.  It  created  purely  civil 
faculties  of  theology,  with  the  right  of  conferring  grades,  the 
possession  of  which  was  made  a  sine  qua  non  for  obtaining 
ecclesiastical  dignities;  while  the  men  who  conferred  these 
grades  were  obliged  to  swear  obedience  to  the  Grand  Master 
of  the  University,  M.  de  Fontanes — a  wily  and  bold  strata- 
gem for  transferring  superior  theological  training  from  the 
Church,  where  it  na'.urally  resides,  into  the  hands  of  the  Im 
perial  University. 


34  Life  ^^(i  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

Napoleon  writes  to  his  Minister  of  Public  Worship  :*  **  A 
priest  who  has  never  been  under  any  other  superintendence 
than  that  of  his  ecclesiastical  superiors  cannot  occupy  a  posi- 
tion of  the  first  rank  unless  the  University  confers  it  on  him, 
which  it  may  decline  to  do  in  the  event  of  his  being  known 
to  hold  ultramontane  opinions,  or  others  dangerous  to  au- 
thority." 

So  comprehensive  a  scheme  of  spiritual  tyranny  has  no  pre- 
cedent in  ancient  or  modern  history,  and  yet  this  yoke  was 
borne  by  France  all  through  the  Empire,  under  the  specious 
pretext  that  it  was  the  safeguard  of  national  unity. 

The  department  of  morals  fared  no  better  than  that  of 
dogma.  Napoleon  established  divorce,  thereby  violently  out- 
raging the  law  of  the  Church.  Portalis  issued  a  decree  for- 
bidding priests  to  refuse  the  blessing  of  the  Church  to  persons 
who  chose  to  marry  again  after  being  divorced. 

The  Sabbath  was  altered  from  the  seventh  day  to  the 
tenthjt  not  perhaps  so  much  as  a  measure  of  political  econo- 
my, as  from  Napoleon's  desire  to  show  his  power  to  set  aside 
a  time-honored  law  of  Christendom.  His  efforts  proved  a 
failure.  It  is  still  related  in  parts  of  France  how  the  very 
^  oxen  resented  the  violation  of  the  Divine  law,  and  knew  the 
day  of  rest  instinctively,  moaning  and  lowing  in  expostulation 
as  they  drew  the  plough  reluctantly  through  the  fields. 

The  story  of  the  Concordat  of  Fontainebleau  has  been  told 
'.00  often,  and  too  exhaustively,  to  need  more  than  passing 
mention  here.  But  we  read  history  superficially,  and  too 
often  by  the  light  of  our  own  prejudices  and  the  spirit  of  our 
times;  and  many  of  us,  in  judging  of  this  event,  are  apt  to 
overlook  the  main  features  of  the  case,  the  long  series  of 
harassing  persecutions  that  prepared  it,  the  crafty  system  of 
oppression,  treachery,  and  humiliation  which  brought  the 
clergy  of  France  into  that  state  of  unworthy  subjection  which 
was  the  primary  condition  and  prelude  of  the  Concordat 

•  '^jerrapondance,  torn.  xiii.  p.  15,  St.  Cloud,  30  J  unlet,  t8a& 

*  S^  Le^n  Tme,  suite  au  ^me  ComoHmdenicnu 


Life  and  Works  of  Frcderu  Ozanam,  35 

The  old  man  at  the  Vatican  was  the  bite  noire  of  the  man 
vho  had  brought  all  the  crowned  heads  of  Europe,  except 
one,  to  bow  down  to  him.  Napoleon  hated  him  as  Haman 
hated  Mordecai,  for,  like  that  stiff-necked  Jew,  who  sat  at  the 
gate  in  his  rags,  and  defied  the  oppressor  of  his  people,  the 
Pope  remained  the  permanent  affirmation  of  a  power  that  de- 
fied Caesar,  and  withstood  ahke  his  bribes  and  his  threats. 
Nothing  had  been  left  undone  to  bring  this  stubborn  power 
into  subjection — caresses,  bribes,  insults,  impfTSonment,  and 
exile;  but  so  far  everything  had  failed,  Pius  VII.  had  now 
been  four  years  a  prisoner  at  Fontainebleau,  his  dominions 
confiscated,  his  spiritual  action  virtually  arrested,  for  he  was 
cut  off  from  all  external  relations  with  the  clergy  and  with 
Christendom,  and  from  the  power  of  carrying  on  the  govern- 
ment of  the  Church.  Napoleon  governed  it  in  France  ac- 
cording to  his  own  views ;  but  he  had  now  come  to  a  diffi- 
cult pass :  death  was  thinning  the  ranks  of  the  hierarchy,  and 
how  was  he  to  replenish  them  witj^ut  the  Pope  ?  He  had 
recourse  to  one  of  his  characteristic  expedients.  He  con- 
voked an  assembly  of  Italian  and  French  bishops — "  his 
bishops  " — in  Paris,  gave  it  the  name  of  a  National  Council, 
and  ordered  it  forthwith  to  pass  a  decree,  whereby,  if  the 
Pope  did  not,  within  six  months,  institute  a  certain  number  of 
bishops,  named  by  the  Emperor,  they  should  be  consecrated 
by  the  Metropolitan. 

The  bishops,  scared  by  the  audacity  of  the  order,  sought  to 
gain  time,  and  timidly  proposed  that  they  should  draw  up  a 
report  on  the  imperial  proposal,  and  refer  the  case  by  deputa- 
tion to  the  august  captive  of  Fontainebleau.  Napoleon  met 
this  act  of  rebellion  by  one  of  those  paroxysms  of  imperial 
anger  which  he  had  often  found  effective  when  other  argu- 
ments failed,  and  without  condescending  to  further  expostula- 
tion, declared  the  National  Council  dissolved.  Three  of  the 
members  were  seized  tliat  night  and  carried  off  to  Vincennes, 
and  detained  there  until  they  sent  in  tlieir  resignation  of  their 
respective  sees.     The  other  bishops,  before  they  had  recov- 


36  lAfe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

ered  from  the  panic  caused  by  this  violent  proceeding,  were 
summoned  one  by  one  into  the  presence  of  the  Minister  of 
PoUce,  and  terrified  into  pledging  themselves  to  deliver  up  the 
hierarchy  into  the  hands  of  their  imperial  master. 

Napoleon,  pacified  by  this  act  of  submission,  once  more 
convened  his  National  Council,  and  this  time  the  shameful 
decree  went  through  the  mockery  of  a  discussion,  and  was 
passed. 

It  is  alleged,  in  extenuation  of  the  cowardly  behavior  of  the 
bishops,  that  they  were  told  the  Pope  had  yielded  his  assent ; 
but  the  monstrous  falsehood  never  should,  never  could,  have 
imposed  upon  them  for  a  moment ;  their  conscience,  as  well 
as  their  experience,  must  have  told  them  it  was  a  lie  and  an 
impossibility. 

Pius  VII.  had  been  at  this  date  four  years  in  confinement, 
cut  off  from  every  friendly  face,  from  all  knowledge  of  what- 
ever was  going  on  outside  the  walls  of  his  prison,  insulted, 
threatened,  subjected  to  every  species  of  moral  torture,  until 
at  last  the  cruel  skill  prevailed.  Broken  in  mind  and  in  body, 
led  to  believe  that  he  was  deserted  by  Christendom,  betrayed 
by  the  clergy  and  hierarchy,  fascinated  too,  at  intervals,  by 
the  magnetic  personal  ascendency  of  Napoleon,  moved  more 
by  his  caresses  than  his  threats,  the  Pontiff  signed  the  fatal 
deed  on  the  25th  of  January,  1813. 

The  momentary  aberration  was  quickly  Vepented  of  and 
disavowed,  but  it  remains  an  eternal  example  of  the  danger 
which  the  Church  must  run  when  she  forfeits  her  temporal  in- 
dependence, and  is  stripped  of  the  protecting  bulwarks  of  her 
temporal  power. 

Napoleon  thought  that  he  had  now  compassed  his  long- 
desired  end,  that  he  had  henceforth  nothing  to  fear  from  the 
decrepit  old  Pontiff,  or  the  cowed  priesthood  whom  his  weak- 
ness had  misled,  and  who  were  still  ignorant  of  his  prompt 
ftnd  vehement  recantation.     The  conqueror  of  Europe  beheld 


Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  37 

himself  in  spirit  the  centre  of  an  apotheosis,  wielding  the 
sceptre  over  the  souls  as  well  as  the  bodies  of  all  Christendom ; 
he  beheld  the  stern  majesty  of  the  Church  of  Rome  prostrate 
at  his  feet,  as  the  Greek  Church  was  at  the  feet  of  his  brother 
C^ssar  of  Russia.  What  a  serene  and  glorious  pageant  was 
that  which  passed  in  fancy  before  the  eyes  of  the  great  war- 
rior, as  he  paced  the  green  alleys  of  Fontainebleau,  while  close 
by,  within  the  palace  walls,  Pius  VII.  was  weeping  bitter, 
penitent  tears  I 

The  partisans  of  Napoleon  I.  are  proud  of  claiming  for  him 
the  gratitude  of  the  Church  of  Christ.  They  say  that  he  came 
and  found  her  in  the  mire,  a  beggar  and  an  outcast  where  she 
had  once  been  queen,  and  that  he  stretched  forth  his  hand  and 
raised  her  up,  and  clothed  her  in  scarlet  and  gold,  and  placed 
a  crown  upon  her  head.  It  is  true  he  did  all  this,  and  then 
he  claimed  his  reward.  It  was  not  much,  only  the  imme- 
morial bargain  of  which  Satan  first  pronounced  the  formula  in 
the  desert  outside  Jerusalem  nearly  two  thousand  years  ago — 
si  cadens  cuioraveris  me, 

God*s  hour  came ;  Waterloo  came.  Napoleon  fell,  and  the 
Church  of  Christ  remained.  No  wonder  she  hailed  with 
joy  the  return  of  the  Bourbons  to  France.  The  restora- 
tion appeared  to  her  like  the  dawn  of  freedom  and 
dignity. 

The  Sabbath  was  passed  into  a  law,  bishops  recovered  the 
direction  of  their  seminaries,  religious  orders  were  encouraged 
by  the  State ;  in  fact,  religion  was  patronized  in  high  places. 
Many  of  the  Ministers  were  sincere  Catholics,  and  threw  the 
weight  of  their  influence  honestly  into  the  effort  at  a  general 
reform  amongst  the  people.  To  this  effect  missions  were 
opened  in  the  towns  and  villages;  there  was  preaching  in  the 
market-places  and  in  the  fields ;  processions  were  seen  wind- 
ing through  the  valleys  as  in  olden  times;  pilgrims  journeyed 
to  distant  shrmes,  and  filled  the  forest  glades  with  tne  long- 
forgotten  sound  of  hymns  and  canticles.  The  reign  of  faith 
was  restored  to  France,  and  seemed  enthroned  more  ferventljr 


jS  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

than  ever  in  the  hearts  of  her  people.  So  it  seemed ;  but  it 
was  not  so  in  reaUty. 

There  was  no  doubt  a  good  deal  of  sincere  individual  piety 
in  all  these  demonstrations,  but,  as  regarded  the  general  re- 
sult, the  movement  was  an  utter  failure.  Nor  can  we  wonder 
at  this.  The  Revolution  had  destroyed  and  profaned  the  old 
temples,  and  done  its  best  to  crush  every  spark  of  faith  out  of 
the  country,  and  if  the  work  of  annihilation  had  not  been 
complete  it  was  universal  and  tremendous.  Napoleon, 
emerging  at  this  period  of  social  chaos,  had  judged  it  advis- 
able to  curb  the  lawless  infidelity  of  the  nation  by  imposing 
on  it  a  State  religion.  The  yoke  had  been  accepted  out- 
wardly; but  despotism  makes  few  converts-— it  makes  hypo- 
crites instead ;  and  in  the  present  instance,  not  being  rein- 
forced by  the  sanguinary  orthodoxy  of  the  Inquisition,  it 
merely  engendered  corruption  and  a  cynical  contempt  of  all 
religion.  The  people  were  not  to  be  driven  by  law  into  keep- 
ing the  commandments  and  obeying  the  precepts  of  the 
Church  because  the  Emperor  decreed  they  were  to  do  so. 
The  old  edifice  was  sapped  to  its  foundation,  and  it  must  take 
more  than  a  nod  from  Caesar  to  rebuild  it. 

When,  therefore,  Louis  XVIII.  inserted  a  bona  fide  clause 
in  his  charter  constituting  the  kingdom  Catholic,  the  kingdom 
laughed — laughed  in  defiance  and  derision.  Whatever  the 
faults  of  the  French  are,  hypocrisy  never  was  one  of  them ; 
and  to  be  thus  officially  labelled  as  members  of  a  Church 
which  they  had  ceased  to  believe  in,  roused  all  that  remained 
of  native  honesty  and  independence  in  the  national  mind. 
It  had  taken  more  than  a  generation  to  make  them  atheists 
and  sceptics,  and  it  was  not  to  be  expected  they  would  now 
•urn  Christians  at  the  bidding  of  a  State  paper.  The  efforts 
of  the  Government  to  bring  about  such  a  result  only  irritated 
and  aggravated  the  existing  evil  by  provoking  a  spirit  of 
direct  antagonism. 

For  instance,  it  had  taken  years  to  wean  the  working 
classes  from  the  routine  observance  of  the  Sabbath,  but  hav- 


Ufe  and  JlW/:s  oj  Rcdcrk  Ozanam,  39 

ing  finally  broken  with  the  habit,  they  had  no  mind  to  take  il 
ap  again;  they  had  grown  used  to  open  their  shops  on  Sun- 
days, and  it  required  the  constant  and  active  intervention  of 
the  law  to  make  them  close  them ;  even  at  the  present  day, 
as  we  all  know,  this  reform  remains  a  struggle  in  which  the 
Fourth  Commandment  is  but  partially  triumphant.  The 
Catechism  of  1793,  written  in  the  blood  of  their  murdered  king, 
and  enforced  by  the  guillotine,  had  taught  the  people  hatred 
of  all  constituted  authority,  and  this  hatred  was  more  specially 
directed  to  the  highest  expression  of  authority  on  earth.  They 
had  seen  the  Church  thrown  down,  and  trampled  under  foot 
by  anarchy,  then  picked  up  to  serve  as  an  instrument  in  the 
hands  of  despotism ;  she  had  lost  all  prestige  in  their  eyes, 
and  become  the  symbol  of  a  despised  and  fallen  rigime^  the 
wreck  of  a  power  whose  day  had  passed  to  give  way  to  the 
day  of  Voltaire.  The  reign  of  Voltaire  had  succeeded  to  the 
reign  of  Christ.  So  long,  however,  as  this  succession  was 
tacitly  admitted,  the  zeal  of  the  worshippers  was  slack  enough  ; 
but  no  sooner  did  a  Christian  Government  appear,  and  an- 
nounce its  intention  of  reinstating  the  Gospel  in  its  lost  su- 
premacy, than  the  smouldering  zeal  of  the  Voltairians  leaped 
out  in  a  flame.  Voltaire's  works  had  not  been  reprinted  once 
under  the  Empire,  but  from  181 7  to  1824  no  less  than  twelve 
fresh  editions  were  called  for  and  exhausted  in  France.  Na- 
poleon had  given  back  to  divine  worship  the  churches  which 
the  Revolution  had  taken  from  it ;  but  it  was  one  thing  to 
restore  churches,  and  another  to  restore  the  faith  that  had 
worshipped  there;  so  it  was  easy  now  to  throw  down  Vol- 
taire's statues,  and  to  cast  out  his  unhallowed  dust  from 
beneath  the  consecrated  altar  of  the  living  God,  but  it  was 
another  thing  to  overturn  his  empire  in  hearts  from  which  his 
presence  had  banished  the  reign  of  "  the  Galilean." 

The  restoration  opened  schools,  and  paid  Christian  teach- 
ers, but  it  could  not  provide  docile  pupils  to  attend  them ; 
the  children  of  men  who  used  up  twelve  editions  of  Voltaire 
in  eight  years  were  not  likely  to  prove  willing  listeners  to 


40  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

masters  who  cried  anathema  on  Voltaire  and  his  doctrines; 
they  had  imbibed  a  spirit  which  was  instinctively  hostile  to 
the  spirit  of  the  Gospel;  they  were  thirsting  for  other  lessons. 

But  although  undoubtedly  this  was  the  general  rule,  it  was 
redeemed  by  exceptions.  The  old  tree  had  been  stricken,  but 
there  was  life  in  its  roots  still,  and  the  sap  was  rising  through 
the  seared  branches,  and  putting  forth  young  shoots  here  and 
there.  Amidst  the  youth  born  of  this  period,  there  were 
many  who  thirsted  for  purer  and  stronger  waters  than  those 
poisoned  ones  from  which  their  fathers  had  drunk ;  there  were 
seeds  of  fiery  activity  in  their  natures,  which  only  required  to 
be  fostered  by  the  right  guide  in  order  to  bring  forth  good 
fruit.  Men  cannot  summon  these  guides  to  their  own  rescue, 
but  God,  who  loves  His  creatures,  and  holds  the  thread  of 
their  destinies,  even  when  they  stray  from  Him,  can  and 
often  mercifully  does.  He  never  leaves  Himself  without  a 
witness  on  the  earth,  although  at  times  it  seems  as  though  He 
did,  as  if  He  abandoned  humanity  to  its  own  perverse  and 
wayward  folly,  letting  falsehood  prevail  and  truth  perish,  but 
in  His  own  appointed  time  He  comes  forth  and  produces  His 
witness  to  exalt  the  one  and  confound  the  other. 

Those  who  have  made  any  serious  study  of  the  state  of 
society  in  France  at  the  period  when  Frederic  Ozanam,  in 
his  capacity  of  a  Christian  teacher,  first  appeared  on  its  scene, 
will  hardly  tax  us  with  exaggeration  if  we  claim  for  him  the 
grave  and  bright  responsibility  of  having  been  in  his  sphere 
one  of  these  witnesses  of  God  to  his  generation.  He  himself 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  early  imbued  with  the  idea  that  some 
special  mission  would  be  confided  to  him ;  that  he  would  at 
a  given  time  be  employed  in  the  defence  of  truth.  This 
dominant  idea  permeates  his  whole  mind,  and  recurs  fre- 
(|uently  in  his  letters  during  his  sojourn  at  M.  Ampere's,  and 
he  never  ceases  to  urge  his  fellow-students  to  aspire  to  the 
same  glorious  mission,  and  prepare  themselves  to  accomplish 
it  worthily. 


CHAPTER  IV. 
1832. 

Few  things  in  the  condition  of  society  in  France  during 
the  years  which  followed  the  revolution  of  1830  were  more 
remarkable  and  more  dispiriting  than  the  apathy  which  per- 
vaded all  classes.  Indeed,  the  sound  portion  of  society,  the 
party  of  order,  as  they  have  come  to  be  called,  have  at  all 
times  displayed,  in  the  strongest  degree,  this  criminal  weak- 
ness;  whenever  a  crisis  comes,  they  collapse;  resignation 
and  passive  endurance  become  the  practical  epitome  of 
their  creed ;  they  He  down  and  let  the  communists  of  the 
hour  walk  over  them. 

When  Ozanam  came  to  Paris,  the  department  of  Public 
Instruction  still  showed  signs  of  this  fatal  inertia,  which  had 
deadened  it  under  the  Empire,  when  open  hostility  to  reli- 
gion and  morals  had  given  way  to  sleek  oppression  and  an 
outward  varnish  of  respect  as  offensive  as  it  was  paralyzing. 

The  Restoration  had  inaugurated  a  new  era,  but  the 
energy  to  profit  by  it  was  wanting;  indifference  and  the 
laisser-alkr  spirit  had  become  a  rooted  habit  in  men's  minds, 
and  was  not  to  be  cured  in  a  day. 

These  periods  of  coma  are  the  grand  opportunity  of  false 
prophets  and  founders  of  new  religions ;  then  it  is  that  they 
stand  forth  and  call  around  them  the  restless  spirits  who, 
impatient  at  the  general  stagnation,  chafe  under  the  dead 
weight,  and  burn  to  find  an  outlet  for  their  pent-up 
energies.  The  Abb6  de  Lamennais  was  the  great  false  pro- 
phet of  this  period.  Partly  the  creation,  partly  the  reaction 
of  the  spirit  of  his  times,  he  responded  fully  to  its  cry,  and 

4» 


42  Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

took  a  hold  upon  the  sympathies  of  his  fellow-men  unparal* 
leled  perhaps  in  the  history  of  similar  influences. 

Before  this  bright  misleading  star  had  risen,  the  St.  Simo- 
nians  were  in  the  field,  promising  to  lead  humanity  to  the 
second  earthly  Paradise,  attracting  great  numbers  of  the 
young  by  their  specious  and  brilliant  theories. 

Frederic  Ozanam  had  drawn  his  maiden  sword  against 
them,  as  we  saw,  and  with  considerable  local  effect;  but  the 
ranks  of  the  St.  Simonians  were  growing.  He  saw  this  in 
Paris  better  than  he  could  have  done  at  Lyons.  The  various 
classes  which  he  attended  bore  evidence  to  the  necessity  for 
some  counteracting  force  to  stem  the  torrent  of  absurd  and 
impious  doctrines  which  pojiired  out  daily  from  these  foun- 
tains where  the  young  generation  came  to  drink.  Frederic 
was  fond  of  relating  an  incident  connected  with  the  lectures 
at  the  College  de  France.  M.  Letrone,  the  Professor,  was 
lecturing  on  the  Deluge,  and  was  at  great  pains  to  prove 
that  the  story  of  the  universal  flood  was  a  popular  fallacy ; 
there  had  not  been  one  great,  but  several  smaller  deluges,  at 
different  epochs  and  in  different  places.  This  theory,  besides 
its  novelty,  had  the  immense  advantage  of  throwing  discredit 
on  the  "  legend  of  Genesis,"  if  it  could  be  maintained. 
The  audience  listened  with  profound  attention,  but  Ozanam 
could  not  conceal  his  impatience.  A  young  man  named 
Lallier  noticed  the  angry  glances  and  expressive  shrugs  in 
which  he  vented  his  feelings  at  every  fresh  absurdity  pro- 
pounded by  the  learned  Professor.  M.  Lallier,  who,  for  the 
same  reason  as  Frederic,  had  kept  aloof  from  companions 
of  his  own  age  in  Paris,  determined,  as  soon  as  the  lecture 
was  over,  to  go  and  make  acquaintance  with  him.  Ozanam 
however,  left  before  the  end  of  it,  and  the  opportunity  was 
lost.  Several  weeks  elapsed  before  they  met  again ;  it  was 
at  a  lecture  of  the  Abbe  Gerbet's.  On  issuing  from  the 
room,  Frederic  was  at  once  surrounded  by  a  group  of  stu- 
y  dents,  who  were  discussing  with  great  animation  the  ideas 
'   set  forth  by  the  lecturer ;  M.  Lallier  went  up  and  spoke  to 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  (.  zanam.  43 

him,  and  it  was  not  long  before  the  chance  acquaintance 
ripened  to  a  friendship  which  lasted  without  a  cloud  until 
Ozanam's  death. 

The  number  of  Catholic  young  men  was  thus  augmenting 
in  the  various  classes,  or  it  might  be  more  accurate  to  say 
they  were  finding  each  other  out,  and,  gathering  courage 
from  union,  were  holding  up  their  heads  more  boldly.  Fear 
of  public  opinion,  that  plague  of  religion  and  morality  in 
France,  had  held  many  back  from  avowing  themselves  Ca- 
tliolics,  because  they  fancied  they  were  alone.  One  young 
student,  who  had  often  seen  Ozanam  at  the  Ecole  de  Droit, 
and  been  attracted  by  his  quiet  diligence  and  the  kindly 
charm  of  his  manner,  but  had  never  ventured  to  seek  his 
acquaintance,  met  him  one  day  coming  out  of  St.  Etienne 
du  Mont.  **  What !"  he  exclaimed,  '*  are  you  a  Catholic  ? 
How  glad  I  am  j  let  us  be  friends ;  I  thought  you  were  an 
atheist !" 

The  following  incident  is  also  significant.  These  two 
young  students,  in  company  with  a  third,  went  one  day  to 
attend  a  sermon  in  one  of  the  largest  churches  in  Paris. 
They  arrived  late,  and  found  every  seat  taken.  Ozanam  and 
his  friend  at  last  secured  places,  but  their  companion,  after 
elbowing  his  way  up  to  the  pulpit,  could  only  find  standing- 
room,  and  there  he  remained.  He  was  six  feet  high,  and 
otherwise  of  a  striking  appearance,  so  that  the  cur6,  who  was 
seated  with  his  clergy  in  the  bancd^ceuvre  opposite,  noticed 
him,  and,  taking  for  granted  that  he  was  standing  there  out 
of  disrespect,  rose  and  publicly  rebuked  him,  adding,  **  Your 
attitude  shows  that  you  are  more  accustomed  to  frequent  the 
theatre  than  the  church."  The  young  man  blushed  deeply, 
but  held  his  ground  until  the  sermon  was  over,  when  he 
went  to  the  sacristy  and  had  an  explanation  with  the  cur^. 
The  latter,  as  may  be  imagined,  was  greatly  distressed  at  his 
mistake,  but,  after  making  an  ample  apology,  remarked, 
"  We  so  seldom  see  a  young  man  in  our  churches,  except  it 
be,  as  I  said,  from  a  bad  motive — to  mock  or  criticise — that  it 


44  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

never  occurred  to  me  you  were  an  exception  to  the  rule.*' 
The  exceptions,  however,  were  increasing  notably.  Frederic 
had  been  little  more  than  a  year  in  Paris  when  he  writes  to 
Ernest  Falconnet : 

•'We  are  more  numerous  than  we  thought.  I  have  met  here  with  young 
men  strong  in  intellectual  vigor,  and  rich  in  generous  sentiments,  who  devote 
their  thoughts  and  researches  to  the  high  mission  which  is  also  yours  and 
mine.  Every  time  a  rationalist  Professor  raises  his  voice  against  Revelation, 
Catholic  voices  are  lifted  up  to  answer  him.  We  have,  several  of  us,  banded 
together  for  this  purpose.  Twice  already  I  have  taken  my  share  of  this  noble 
work  by  addressing  my  objections  in  writing  to  these  gentlemen.  We  have 
had  our  chief  success  at  X.'s  class.  Twice  he  attacked  the  Church,  first  by 
treating  the  Papacy  as  a  temporary  institution,  born  under  Charlemagne,  and 
now  dying  out,  and  the  next  time  in  accusing  the  clergy  of  having  at  all  times 
favored  despotism.  Our  answers  were  publicly  read,  and  produced  the  best 
effect,  both  on  the  Professor,  who  as  good  as  retracted  his  words,  and  on  the 
audience,  who  applauded.  The  most  useful  result  of  all  this  is  that  it  enables 
us  to  show  the  students  of  the  present  day  that  one  tnay  be  a  CatJiolic  and  have 
common  sense,  that  one  may  love  liberty  and  religion  at  the  same  time  ;  also  it 
stirs  them  up  from  their  fatal  religious  indifference,  and  accustems  them  to 
grave  and  earnest  discussion. 

"  But  the  most  interesting  and  consoling  thing  of  all  for  us  young  Christians 
are  the  '  Conferences'  which  have  been  undertaken,  at  our  request,  by  the 
Abbe  Gerbet.  Now  we  may  say  with  truth  that  light  shines  in  the  darkness, 
— Lux  in  tenebris  lucet.  Every  fortnight  we  have  a  lecture  on  philosophy  and 
history  ;  nowhere  does  language  more  penetrating,  or  doctrine  more  profound, 
resound  in  our  ears. 

"  The  system  of  Lamennais,  as  expounded  by  him,  is  no  longer  that  of  his 
provincial  partisans  ;  it  is  the  immortal  alUance  of  faith  and  science,  of  charity 
and  industry,  of  power  and  liberty." 

A  more  serious  passage  of  arms  occurred  between  the  two 
parties  a  few  weeks  later. 

TO  HIS  COUSIN  FALCONNET. 

"The  chair  of  Philosophy  at  the  Sorbonne  was  the  battle-field.  Professor 
Jouffroy,  one  of  the  most  illustrious  rationalists  of  our  day,  thought  fit  to 
attack  Revelation,  the  very  possibility  of  Revelation.  A  young  man,  a  Ca- 
tholic, addressed  some  remarks  to  him  in  writing,  to  which  the  philosopher 
promised  to  reply.  He  waited  fifteen  days,  to  get  ready  his  weapons  no  doubt, 
and  then,  without  reading  the  letter,  he  just  made  a  sort  of  analysis  of  it,  and 
tried  to  refute  it  after  his  own  fashion.  The  Catholic  student,  seeing  that  he 
was  misunderstood,  sent  a  second  letter  to  the  Professor,  who  this  time  took 
no  notice  of  it,  but  continued  his  attacks,  protesting  that  Catholicism  repudi- 
ated both  science  and  liberty.    Thereupon  we  all  met  and  drew  up  a  protest 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanajti.  45 

which  embodied  our  real  sentiments  ;  it  was  signed  hastily  by  fifteen  studerts, 
and  addressed  to  M.  Jouffroy.  This  he  could  not  avoid  reading.  The  au- 
dience, composed  of  over  200  persons,  listened  with  respect  to  our  profession 
of  faith.  The  philosopher  hummed  and  hawed,  confounded  himself  in  apolo- 
gies, declared  that  he  never  meant  to  attack  Christianity  in  particular,  which 
he  held,  on  the  contrary,  in  the  highest  veneration,  and  promised  to  endeavor 
for  the  future  not  to  wound  the  belief  of  any  of  his  Catholic  hearers.  But 
above  all,  he  mentioned  a  fact  which  is  most  significant,  and  most  encouraging 
for  our  times:  *  Gentlemen,'  he  said,  'five  years  cigo  all  the  objections  sent 
in  to  me  were  dictated  by  materialism  ;  spiritualistic  doctrines  met  with  the 
fiercest  resistance  ;  to-day  this  feeling  is  greatly  altered :  the  opposition  has 
become  quite  Catholic'  It  is  sad  to  see  him  struggling  to  solve  the  problem 
of  human  destinies  by  the  mere  force  of  reason  ;  the  most  absurd  inconsisten- 
cies and  contradictory  admissions  escape  him  every  day.  Lately  he  declared 
it  was  false  that  the  righteous  were  ever  unhappy,  or  that  the  wicked  were 
ever  spared  in  this  world.  Yesterday  he  confessed  that  the  cravings  of  the 
intellect  are  insatiable,  that  science,  far  from  satisfying  them,  only  serves  to 
discover  their  boundlessness,  and  leads  man  to  despair  by  showing  him  the 
impossibility  of  ever  reaching  perfection. 

"  He  admitted  that  material  knowledge  did  not  suffice  to  our  minds,  and 
that  after  exhausting  it  the  void  remained,  and  he  himself  felt  impelled  to 
seek  for  supernatural  light.  My  dear  friend,  one  must  pity  them,  these  poor 
philosophers  of  rationalism  1  If  you  could  but  hear  their  extravagant  propo- 
sitions and  their  stupid  attacks  on  Christianity,  mere  servile  declamations 
from  Voltaire,  always  on  the  same  key ;  if  you  could  hear  one  of  them,  for 
instance,  trjing  to  explain  away  miracles  by  asserting  that,  the  laws  of  nature 
being  beyond  our  reach,  we  cannot  appreciate  their  derogations,  and  that  the 
resurrection  of  a  dead  man  would  present  nothing  miraculous  to  a  savant  of  \y 
our  day ! — if  you  could  but  hear  all  this,  would  you  not  congratulate  Chris- 
tianity on  having  such  adversaries  ? 

"  Let  us  cheer  up  ;  our  enemies  are  weak  ;  these  fine  doctors  of  incredulity 
could  be  worsted  by  the  simplest  of  our  village  priests  :  let  us  cheer  up,  I  say, 
for  the  work  of  God  is  advancing,  and  will  be  accomplished  by  the  youth  of 
this  very  day  ;  who  knows  ?  perhaps  even  by  you  and  me  1" 

The  zeal  and  ability  which  the  growing  group  of  young 
Catholics  displayed  in  the  service  of  truth  certainly  justified 
this  sanguine  expectation.  Frederic  was  as  yet  far  from  real- 
izing that  he  was  himself  the  mainspring  of  the  movement, 
yet  such  was  already  the  case.  From  this  time  forward  a  no- 
table change  was  observed  in  the  tone  of  the  Professors  of 
the  Sorbonne;  their  teaching  continued  as  radically  anti- 
Christian  as  before,  but  they  were  more  guarded  in  their  lan- 
guage, more  considerate  for  the  feelings  of  the  Christian  por- 


/ 


46  Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

tion  of  their  audience.  This  change  was  attributed  by  every 
one  to  young  Ozanam's  influence.  He  modestly  speaks  of 
the  able  letter  which  had  been  written  to  M.  Joufifroy  as  "  a 
protest  which  we  drew  up,"  but  it  was  in  reality  entirely  his 
work,  and  displayed  an  amount  of  scientific  and  historical 
knowledge  which  showed  the  infidel  philosopher  that  Chris- 
tianity would  defend  herself  with  those  very  weapons  which 
he  and  his  school  fancied  were  their  own  exclusive  possessioa 


CHAPTER  V. 

Frederic's  residence  with  M.  Ampere  was  an  advantage 
lo  him  in  many  ways.  The  patriarch  of  mathematicians,  as 
he  was  styled,  soon  conceived  a  fatherly  affection  for  his 
young  guest,  and  yielded  to  his  virtues  and  talents  that  gen- 
erous tribute  of  admiration  which  true  greatness  so  readily 
pays  to  both.  He  liked  nothing  better  than  to  call  Frederic 
into  his  study,  and  converse  with  him  by  the  hour  on  philoso- 
phy and  science ;  he  frequently  solicited  his  assistance  at  his 
work,  and  long  treatises  on  scientific  subjects  are  still  pre- 
served written  half  by  one  and  half  by  the  other.  Even  after 
Frederic  had  left  him,  on  the  return  of  his  son  from  Germany, 
and  gone  to  live  in  chambers,  M.  Ampere  constantly  sent  to  beg 
his  help  in  some  urgent  and  difficult  work.  Once,  when  he  had 
only  a  few  days  to  remain  in  Paris  for  the  completion  of  a  plan 
for  the  classification  of  sciences,  to  which  he  attached  great 
importance,  he  writes  to  the  hard-worked  student — "  Come, 
I  entreat  you,  for  the  sake  of  all  the  friendship  you  bear  me ; 
there  is  not  a  moment  to  lose,  if  you  will  not  deprive  me  of  a 
thing  to  which  I  attach  immense  interest."  M.  Ampere  used 
to  say  that  if  Ozanam  had  devoted  himself  exclusively  to  sci- 
ence he  would  have  been  the  first  mathematician  of  his  age. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  but  that  his  literary  power  was  greatly 
strengthened  by  the  scientific  knowledge  which  he  acquired, 
almost  by  contagion,  from  M.  Ampdre.  He  had  always  a 
great  horror  of  becoming  simply  a  man  of  letters,  and  nothing 
else ;  a  man  whose  mind  only  worked  in  one  way  and  on  one 
subject  like  a  machine.  While  still  a  mere  boy  he  felt  that 
true  instinct  of  genius  which  rebels  against  a  groove,  and 
longs  for  space.     He  began  very  early  to  plough  up  his  mind 


4^  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

in  every  direction,  and  sow  a  variety  of  seeds  in  order  that  he 
might  reap  many  and  various  crops.  Science  proved  a  valu- 
able helpmate  to  him ;  he  owed  to  it,  probably,  in  a  great 

^  measure  his  sheer  inability  to  treat  any  subject  superficially. 
He  loved  it,  too,  for  its  own  sake,  because  it  opened  out  to 
him  resources  in  every  part  of  nature,  revealing  secrets  which 
literature  cannot  discover,  but  only  describe ;  because  it  fur- 
nished him  with  contrasts  and  comparisons  of  endless  variety 
and  beauty,  and  was  unconsciously  educating  him  to  be  deep, 
philosophical,  and  harmonious  as  a  writer.  Sometimes  in 
these  intimate  conversations,  the  sense  of  the  mysteries  and 
beauties  of  nature  which  M.  Ampere's  own  remarks  or  re- 
searches suggested  would  throw  the  Christian  savant  into  a  sud- 
den ecstasy  of  admiration  and  reverent  self-abasement.  Many 
a  time  he  would  break  off  abruptly  in  what  he  was  explaining 
or  investigating,  and  burying  his  great  white  head  in  his  hands 
cry  out  like  one  overpowered  by  some  high  presence,  *'  Oh 
how  great  God  is,  Ozanam  !  how  great  God  is  I" 

The  example  of  the  old  man's  strong  and  simple  faith  was 
a  constant  lesson,  and  sometimes  a  great  support  to  Frederic. 
His  own  faith  was  sound  and  fervent,  but  it  was  not  proof 

v/  against  those  intervals  of  decouragement*  and  occasional 
sinkings  of  the  heart  which  are  consistent  with  the  firmest 
intellectual  belief.  He  was  all  his  life  a  sufferer  from  both, 
and  now,  overdriven  as  he  was  by  work,  weary  sometimes  of 
the  sustained  effort  which  seemed  to  bring  such  little  result, 
while  all  around  him  egotism  and  infidelity  were  prosperous 
and  rampant,  he  was  occasionally  assailed  by  a  feeling  of 
bitterness,  almost  of  resentment,  against  the  faith  which  ruled 
his  soul,  but  which  was  slow  to  repay  the  constant  sacrifice 
it  demanded.  One  day,  while  a  prey  to  this  feeling,  he  went 
out,  and,  walking  in  the  direction  of  St.  Etienne  du  Mont, 
turned  in,  more  from  routine,  or  some  unconscious  impulse, 
than  from  any  deliberate  prompting  of  piety ;  he  advanced 

*The  word  has  no  exact  equivalent  in  English.    "  Low  spirita  "  will  noi  do,  w  •  maa  ouwr  to 
]•  kigh  spints  and  yet  Uii  44e»wtaf<l. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  49 

meclianically  towards  a  favorite  shrine,  where,  as  usual,  a 
group  of  humble  worshippers,  women  and  children  for  the 
most  part,  were  collected,  and  there  kneeling  in  the  midst  of 
them,  in  an  attitude  of  rapt  devotion,  he  beheld  M.  Ampere. 
The  sight,  the  lesson  it  conveyed,  went  straight  to  the  young 
man's  heart;  he  burst  into  tears,  and  falling  on  his  knees, 
repented  of  having  harbored,  even  in  passing,  a  disloyal 
thought  toward  that  faith  before  whose  sublimest  mystery  his 
great  and  venerable  master  knelt  in  lowly  and  joyous  adora- 
tion. 

This  tendency  to  decouragemeni,  which  remained  all  his 
life  a  source  of  keen  suffering  to  Frederic,  doubtless  in  some 
degree  resulted  from  physical  conditions,  from  a  health 
naturally  delicate,  and  whicli,  from  his  earliest  years,  he 
had  pitilessly  overtaxed ;  but  it  may  be  still  more  regarded 
as  part  of  the  price  which  most  men  pay  for  high  mental  and 
spiritual  gifts.  As  life  went  on,  dccouragement  became  in  him 
a  kind  of  self-weariness,  a  profound  recoil  from  self,  the 
natural  result  of  that  ceaseless  inward  strife  which,  with  the 
help  of  grace,  he  was  carrying  on,  and  also  of  his  finely  dis- 
ciplined nature.  The  sense  of  failure  in  the  life-long  unsur- 
rendering  battle  did  not  disturb  the  harmony  of  his  mind ; 
the  sadness  it  engendered  was  of  that  noble  kind  which,  in 
pure  and  compassionate  souls,  grows  out  of  the  experience  of 
life,  and  pours  itself  out  in  pity ;  it  never  turned  sour,  like 
that  of  a  disappointed  man  who  vents  his  bitterness  in  hatred 
and  sterile  denunciations,  and  too  often  lapses  from  sheer 
despair  of  mankind  into  unworthy  self-betrayal.  Ozanam's 
fault  was,  on  the  contrary,  to  believe  too  much  in  his  fellow- 
creatures,  to  attribute  virtue  and  goodness  to  them  instinc- 
tively, and  to  lay  the  responsibility  of  their  follies  and  crimes 
too  exclusively  at  the  door  of  that  abstract  criminal  called 
Society.  He  reserved  his  severest  denunciations  for  himself, 
and  he  is  unsparing  enough  of  them.  Alluding  to  this  very 
%v^]tz\.Q{  decoura^ement,\{Q.  gives  the  following  explanation 
of  it :  "  There  are  two  sorts  of  pride ,  one  is  satisfied  with 


y 


5©  Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

self:  this  is  the  commonest  and  tlie  least  bad.  The  other  is 
discontented,  because  it  expects  great  things  from  self,  and  is 
disappointed.  This  latter  kind,  the  most  refined  and  by  far 
the  most  dangerous,  is  mine."  Great  minds  are  commonly 
humble  ones;  for  humility  is,  after  all,  but  a  clear,  compre- 
hensive view  of  the  gulf  that  divides  self,  as  we  are  supposed 
to  see  it — as  the  Christian,  or  even  the  philosopher,  sees  it — 
from  the  ideal  self  that  we  are  aiming  at.  The  grandest 
minds  are  apt  to  realize  this  best,  as  the  finest  natures  are 
sure  to  suffer  most  from  the  sense  of  failure,  in  virtue  of  their 
finer  sympathies  and  higher  aspirations. 

At  an  age  when  the  steadiest  boys  are  thinking  chiefly  of 
their  amusements,  Frederic  Ozanam  was  brooding  over  the 
miseries  and  wants  of  his  time,  suffering  from  them  as  those 
do  who  love  the  sufferers  too  well  to  take  refuge  in  indifier- 
ence  or  callous  despair.  "  We  must  (^o  something,  but  what 
can  we  do  ?"  was  his  constant  cry;  and  this  anxiety  as  to 
his  vocation  preyed  upon  him,  and  was  made  a  matter  of 
ardent  prayer.  A  career  was  not  in  his  eyes  a  mere  means 
of  livelihood  or  honorable  labor.  He  realized,  as  few  men 
do  at  the  outset  of  life,  that  every  Christian  has  his  work  ap- 
pointed in  the  scheme  of  Divine  Providence,  and  that  though 
we  are  free  to  reject  the  ordinance,  we  are  not  free  to  escape 
the  consequences  of  our  rejection.  He  still  maintained  the 
same  indifference  as  to  the  exact  nature  and  sphere  of  his 
work.  It  was  immaterial  to  him  whether  it  cast  him  in  what 
the  world  calls  a  brilliant  position,  or  left  him  hidden  in 
some  obscure  corner.  His  one  anxiety  was  to  be  where  God 
wished  him  to  be.  This  conscious  purity  of  intention  and 
sincere  conformity  to  the  Divine  will  did  not,  however,  pre- 
vent him  from  feeling  that  natural  anxiety  concerning  the 
future  which  his  circumstances  suggested;  but  he  strove  with 
all  his  might  against  it. 

"  How  often  have  I  wished  beforehand  to  build  the  edifice  of  my  own  life," 
he  says  to  Falconnet,  "  gathering  up  in  fancy  all  that  seemed  to  me  best  cal- 
culated to  make  it  beautiful  and  grand  fronj  my  childish  school-days,  when  I 


Life  and  Works  of  l^rcderic  Ozanam.  51 

dreamt  in  Latin  verses,  until  now,  when  I  dream  of  so  many  other  things. 
You  remember  those  endless  conversations  in  our  walks  together,  when  we 
tised  to  talk  over  the  things  we  were  to  accomplish  some  day. 

"  Poor  mortals  that  we  are,  we  cannot  tell  whether  we  shall  ever  see  to- 
morrow, and  we  want  to  settle  what  we  will  do  in  twenty  years  hence  !  We 
know  not  what  we  are  capable  of  doing,  or  what  is  for  our  happiness,  and  we 
want  to  trace  out  a  road  for  the  development  of  faculties  whose  verj-  exist- 
ence we  are  not  sure  of,  in  order  to  attain  to  a  happiness  which  is  a  mystery  to 
us.  Besides,  think  of  this  :  of  what  use  is  ii  to  know  beforehand  what  we  are 
to  do,  except  in  order  to  do  it  well  ?  What  is  the  use  of  knowing  our  destina- 
tion unless  it  be  to  accomplish  it  ?  What  good  is  it  to  see  our  way  except  to 
walk  ?  Provided,  then,  that  the  traveller  sees  ten  steps  before  him,  will  he 
not  arrive  as  surely  a^  if  he  saw  to  the  end  of  the  road  ?  Provided  that  the 
workman  knows  every  hour  of  the  day  the  task  he  has  to  perform  the  next 
hour,  will  he  not  arrive  as  well  at  the  end  of  his  work  as  if  he  had  the  com- 
plete plan  of  the  architect  before  his  eyes  ?  And  does  it  not  suffice  for  us  to 
know  our  duty  and  our  destiny  for  the  nearest  point  of  the  future,  without 
seeking  to  peer  beyond  it  into  the  infinite  ?  Is  it  not  enough  for  us  to  know 
what  God  appoints  for  us  to-morrow,  without  troubling  ourselves  about  wlmt 
He  may  command  us  to  do  ten  years  hence,  since  between  this  and  then  He 
may  call  us  to  our  rest  ?  I  don't  mean  by  this  that  we  should  be  careless  or 
lazy  in  following  a  vocation  clearly  pointed  out,  but  I  mean  that  we  ought  to 
content  ourselves  with  knowing  a  portion  of  it,  and  pursue  that  calmly  and 
bravely,  and  not  worry  ourselves  about  the  rest  that  is  hidden  from  us.  The 
uncerUinty  of  human  things  should  not  unnerve  our  courage  or  damp  our  ac- 
tivity ;  on  the  contrary,  it  should  attach  us  more  firmly  to  our  duty  in  the  pre- 
sent, because  of  our  ignorance  of  the  future.  We  should  find  great  peace  if 
we  could  imbue  ourselves  with  this  thought,  that  we  are  here  solely  to  accom- 
plish the  will  of  God  ;  that  that  will  is  accomplished  from  day  to  day  ;  and 
that  he  who  dies  leaving  his  task  unfinished,  is  just  as  far  advanced  in  the 
eyes  of  supreme  justice  as  he  who  has  leisure  to  accomplish  it  fully  ;  that 
man  can  no  more  create  his  moral  being  than  his  physical ;  that  we  cannot 
make  ourselves  artists,  poets,  orators,  men  of  genius,  but  tnat  we  become 
such  little  by  little,  and  insensibly,  by  God's  leading.  The  greatest  men  are 
those  who  never  planned  their  own  destinies  beforehand,  but  let  themselves 
be  taken  by  the  hand  and  led." 

The  holidays  of  this  year,  1833,  were  spent  in  a  journey  to 
Italy.  Mme.  Ozanam  accompanied  her  husband  and  sons  as 
far  as  Florence,  and  there  they  parted,  she  remaining  with  a 
married  sister,  while  the  others  went  on  to  Rome,  Naples, 
Milan,  Loreto,  etc.  Frederic  had  from  his  childhood  shown 
a  keen  sense  of  the  beauties  of  nature,  yet,  strange  to  say,  this 
feeling,  which  was  developed  in  so  high  a  degree  later,  does 
not  seem  to  have  been  strongly  called  out  by  this  enchanting 


52  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 


A 


tour;  his  letters  during  the  course  of  it  show  little  trace  of 
enthusiasm  in  this  respect,  while  every  page  bears  witness  to 
his  delight  in  the  beauties  of  art  which  meet  him  at  every 
step ;  he  is  in  raptures  with  the  poetry  of  the  land  of  Tassa 
and  Petrarch,  but  the  feeling  which  transcends  all  others  is  his 
sympathy  with  the  philosophical  idea  everywhere  embodied 
in  art  and  nature ;  this  penetrates  and  absorbs  him  to  the  ex- 
clusion, comparatively  speaking,  of  all  other  studies  and  con- 
templations. Dante  is  the  ideal  impersonation  of  this  phi- 
losophy, and  Ozanam  falls  a  prey  to  the  spell  which  the  semi- 
divine  poet  has  for  centuries  cast  upon  so  many  lofty  and  im- 
passioned souls.  Recalling  the  precise  spot  where  this  spell 
was  first  cast  upon  him,  he  writes,  many  years  afterwards : 

"When,  after  accomplishing  a  pilgrimage  long  dreamed  of,  you  visit 
Rome  for  the  first  time,  and  with  a  thrill  of  reverent  curiosity  ascend 
the  grand  staircase  of  the  Vatican,  and  behold  the  wonders  of  every  age 
and  country  united  in  the  hospitality  of  that  magnificent  abode,  you  come  at 
last  to  a  spet  which  may  be  called  the  sanctuary  of  Christian  art— the  cham- 
bers of  Raphael." 

Here,  in  presence  of  that  immortal  masterpiece,  the  Dis- 
pute on  the  Blessed  Sacrament,  he  is  seized  with  enthusiastic 
admiration ;  but  what  strikes  him  first,  what  impresses  him 
i/  above  everything  else,  is  the  laurel-crowned  figure  of  Dante. 
How  came  the  Florentine  poet  to  stand  thus  amidst  the  most 
venerable  and  accredited  defenders  of  the  Divine  mystery  ? 
This  question  takes  hold  of  Ozanam,  and  leaves  him  no  peace 
until  he  has  worked  out  its  solution,  as  we  shall  see. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

1833. 
fH«  requirements  of  the  young  Catholic  party  grew  witb 
thair  numbers,  and  they  soon  began  to  feel  the  want  of  a 
meeting-place  where  they  could  coalesce  and  discuss  theii 
plan  of  action.  This  primary  want  was  unexpectedly  sup- 
plied by  M.  Bailly.  M.  Bailly,  or  the  Pfere  Bailly,  as  the 
affectioLate  familiarity  of  his  young  friends  had  nicknamed 
him,  was  a  worthy  old  gentleman,  the  proprietor  of  a  printing 
jstablishment  and  a  newspaper,  who  received  into  his  house  a 
certain  number  of  young  men  studying  for  their  droit.  His 
newspaper,  the  Tribune  Catholique,  was  a  remarkable  institu- 
tion ;  it  had  no  subscribers  to  speak  of,  but  appeared  regular- 
ly three  times  a  week,  and  was  sent  gratis  to  everybody  who 
would  read  it.  It  had  been  founded  in  1828,  under  the  name 
of  the  Correspondant^  and  soon  became  the  recognized  organ 
of  Catholicism,  and  continued  so  until  1830,  when  M.  de 
Lamennais  came  to  Paris  and  founded  the  Avenir^  which  kill- 
ed it  M.  Bailly,  foreseeing  this  result,  had  advised  M.  de 
Lamennais  to  take  up  the  Correspondant  and  graft  his  new 
journal  upon  it,  instead  of  founding  an  original  one ;  but  M. 
de  Lamennais  declined  the  offer.  Restarted  the  ^i;<?«/>,  and 
almost  immediately  the  Correspondant  died.  M.  Bailly  soon 
saw,  however,  that  the  success  of  the  brilliant  new  journal 
represented  a  danger  more  to  be  deplored  than  the  fall  of  his 
own  paper,  and  that  it  was  absolutely  necessary  to  oppose  a 
breakwater  of  some  sort  to  the  extreme  doctrines  which  were 
pouring  out  from  the  Avenir,  with  the  bewildering  force  and 
beauty  of  a  mountain-torrent  let  loose.  Accordingly,  in  1831, 
he  started  the  Tribune  CatJwlique^  which,  like  its  predecessor, 
appeared  every  second  day,  and  went  gratis  to  everybody  who 


54  ^f^  ^nd  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

would  read  it.  M.  Bailly  composed  the  whole  of  it  himself  j 
politics,  literature,  news,  reviews,  all  issued  from  his  indefatiga* 
ble  pen,  supplemented  occasionally  by  an  article  from  one  of 
his  pupils,  who  were  proud  to  contribute  in  the  measure  of 
their  ability  to  the  heroic  newspaper. 

The  desire  to  give  these  young  men  an  occupation  which 
would  be  exciting,  and  at  the  same  time  useful — which  would 
keep  them  at  home  of  an  evening,  and  furnish  them  with 
interesting  and  wholesome  subjects  of  discussion — had  had  its 
share  in  P^re  Bailly's  motives  for  founding  the  Tribune  Ca- 
tholique.  While,  however,  rendering  full  justice  to  his  disin- 
terestedness, and  that  keen  sympathy  with  the  young,  with 
their  aspirations,  efforts,  and  special  temptations,  which  made 
them  delight  in  his  society,  we  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  fact 
that  M.  Bailly  was  the  proprietor  of  a  printing-press,  and  that 
his  enterprise,  if  it  brought  him  dubious  profits,  involved  but 
little  or  no  pecuniary  risk.  He  and  the  Tribune  Catholique 
lived  at  No.  7  Rue  du  Petit  Bourbon  St.  Sulpice,  and  here  it 
was,  in  the  spacious  office  of  the  newspaper,  that  he  proposed 
Ozanam  and  his  friends  should  assemble  once  a  week,  and 
after  hearing  a  lecture  from  him  on  history  and  rhetoric,  the 
improvised  class-room  should  be  turned  into  a  debating-hall, 
and  the  students  should  hold  forth  amongst  themselves. 

M.  Bailly's  first  idea  had  been  to  admit  none  but  Catholics 
as  members,  but  he  soon  saw  that  this  would  not  do.  In  the 
first  place,  the  Catholics  were  too  few  and  too  scattered,  and 
in  the  next  place,  if  the  members  were  all  of  one  mind,  the 
debates  would  die  of  inanition ;  it  was  absolutely  necessary  to 
feed  them  by  introducing  an  element  of  contradiction.  So 
the  barrier  receded,  and  the  circle  soon  extended  indefinitely. 
Voltairians  and  Fourierists,  Rationalists  and  St.  Simonians, 
Greeks,  Parthians,  and  dwellers  in  Mesopotamia,  flocked  in, 
and  the  debates  became  proportionally  lively  and  interesting. 
After  a  while,  they  became  so  popular  that  the  oflices  of  the 
Tribune  Catholique  could  hold  the  crowd  no  longer.  P^re 
Bailly  again  came  to  the  rescue  by  transferring  th?  field  of 


lAJe  and  Wot1c%  oJ  Frederic  Ozanam.  55 

battle  from  his  own  premises  to  a  spacious  hall  in  the  Place 
dc  I'Estrapade,  which  had  formerly  belonged  to  the  Bonnes 
Etudes,  a  society  founded  in  1811  for  literary  and  scientific 
studies,  and  whose  members  contracted  a  special  obligation 
to  help  each  other  to  get  on  in  the  world.  This  society  had 
been  suppressed  by  the  Revolution.  M.  Bailly  continued  to 
give  his  weekly  lectures  gratis  as  heretofore,  and,  besides  this, 
paid  the  rent  of  the  place  and  all  the  expenses  connected  with 
it ;  he  was  a  poor  man,  but  whenever  there  was  a  service  to 
be  rendered  toTHe  cause  of  truth,  or  to  the  young,  he  contriv- 
ed somehow  to  find  the  necessary  means. 

The  scope  and  power  of  the  young  debaters  seemed  to 
widen  with  their  enlarged  space.  The  polemics  on  both  sides, 
the  Christian  and  the  anti-Christian,  became  so  earnest  that 
the  combatants  had  to  devote  all  the  time  they  could  steal 
from  their  regular  studies  to  preparing  answers  and  attacks. 
The  popularity  of  the  St.  Simonians,  which  had  been  at  its 
culminating  point  only  a  little  while  before,  had  suddenly 
wavered,  and  was  now  on  the  decline;  but  they  had  still 
great  influence,  and  some  of  their  leaders  were  amongst  the 
most  prominent  of  the  debaters.  They  were,  moreover,  gen- 
erally the  aggressors,  and  this  gave  them  the  advantage  of 
arriving  in  the  field  with  their  speeches  prepared  ;  whereas  the 
attacked  party  had  to  answer  impromptu,  and  thus,  from  not 
being  ready  with  chapter  and  verse  to  prove  the  fallacy  of  an 
argument  or  the  error  of  a  statement,  were  sometimes  appar- 
ently worsted  in  the  fight.  Ozanam,  as  the  recognized  leader 
of  the  Christian  party,  took  a  foremost  part  in  the  debates, 
and  displayed  here,  for  the  first  time  in  public,  that  impas- 
sioned and  sympathetic  eloquence  which  was  later  to  win  him 
such  brilliant  triumphs  at  the  Sorbonne.  There  was  also  a 
sort  of  legal  club,  where  the  students  played  at  judge  and 
counsel,  which  seems  to  have  been  very  amusing,  as  well  as 
instructive.  Frederic  was  one  day  called  upon,  at  an  hour's 
notice,  to  supply  the  place  of  attorney-general  in  a  heavy 
and  complicated  cuse ;  and  though  he  acquitted  himself  to 


ffi  ZAfe  and  Works  of  Frcderit  Ozanam. 

the  signal  approval  of  the  court,  be  was  apparently  less  satis- 
fied with  the  result  himself. 

*•  I  felt  nervous  and  weak,"  he  says  to  Falconnet,  "because  I  was  not  sufS- 
ciently  master  of  my  subject "  ;  and  then,  going  on  to  speak  of  the  other  de- 
bates, he  says,  "  But  the  historical  debates  are  quite  another  thing ;  we  meet 
every  Saturday,  and  there  it  is  an  open  field— history,  philosophy,  literature, 
everything  has  free  play.  The  doors  are  open  to  all  opinions,  and  this  results 
in  the  livehest  emulation.  Then  every  composition,  after  it  has  been  read,  is 
handed  over  to  a  committee,  which  criticises  it,  dissects  it,  and  names  a  re- 
porter, who  is  to  be  its  organ  before  the  meeting ;  nothing  escapes  the  sever- 
ity of  this  censorship :  it  goes  into  the  most  minute  details,  and  exercises  i 
control  that  is  sometimes  exceedingly  amusing.  Lastly,  a  superior  committee 
is  established  to  give  one  general  impulse  to  the  whole  conference,  to  point  out 
means  of  advancement,  to  draw  up  the  general  reports,  and  testify  to  the  re- 
sults of  the  common  work.  There  have  been  some  most  interesting  disserta- 
tions, and  some  charming  pieces  of  poetry ;  six  or  seven  compositions  are 
read  at  each  sitting,*' 

Frederic  had  a  sincere  love  of  poetry,  which  he  always  con- 
sidered  a  vital  element  in  intellectual,  almost  in  moral  cul- 
ture. 

"  We  want  something  that  will  take  hold  of  us  and  transport  us,"  he  says, 
*  something  that  will  at  once  possess  and  elevate  our  thoughts.  We  have 
need  of  poetry  in  the  midst  of  the  cold,  prosaic  world  where  we  live,  and,  at 
the  same  time,  of  philosophy,  which  will  give  a  reality  to  our  ideal  concep- 
tions. This  twofold  benefit  we  find  in  Catholicism,  to  which,  for  our  greater 
happiness,  we  are  bound.  Here  then  is  the  starting-point  of  all  our  intellec- 
tual labors,  as  well  as  the  cream  of  our  imagination  ;  here  is  the  central  point 
to  which  they  should  all  converge." 

This  ever-recurring  burden  of  his  song,  love  of  the  faith, 
and  steady,  persevering  efforts  in  its  service,  begins  henceforth 
to  shape  itself  into  a  more  definite  purpose. 

"You  know,"  he  says,  "what  the  great  object  of  my  desires  was  before 
leaving  Lyons.  You  know  tltat  I  yearned  to  form  a  reunion  of  friends  work- 
ing together  at  the  edifice  of  science^  under  tJie  flag  of  Catholic  ideas.  This 
desire  remained  sterile  for  a  long  time,  until  at  last  a  friend  opened  to  me  the 
door  of  a  small  literary  assembly,  the  last  plank  of  what  was  once  the  Soci^te 
des  Bonnes  Etudes,  and  where  the  want  of  scientific  thought  and  study  al- 
most precluded  philosophy  and  serious  research.  We  assembled  in  a  small 
room  ;  fifteen  students,  at  most,  were  faithful  to  the  rendezvous,  and  the 
great  questions  of  the  past  and  future  were  scarcely  touched  upon.  Thanks, 
however,  to  the  zeal  of  a  few,  the  little  society  has  increased  in  a  wonderful 
auinoer ;  it  numbers  to-day  sixty  members,  many  of  whom  bear  names  nof 


r 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  57 

anknown  to  fame ;  a  numerous  audience  is  present  at  our  meetings,  and 
the  large  hall  is  filled  to  overflowing.  We  were  obliged  to  make  certain  severe 
conditions  for  the  admission  of  candidates,  but  nevertheless  they  continue  to 
multiply,  and  we  recruit  daily  young  men  of  superior  ability.  Some  of  them 
are  precocious  travellers,  who  have  visited  various  parts  of  Europe ;  one  even 
has  been  round  the  world  ;  some  have  gone  deeply  into  the  theories  of  art ; 
others  have  sounded  the  problems  of  political  economy ;  the  greater  number  are 
devoted  to  the  study  of  history,  and  a  few  to  philosophy.  We  have  even  two 
or  three  of  those  chosen  spirits  to  whom  God  has  given  wings,  and  who  will 
one  day  be  poets,  if  death  or  the  storms  of  life  do  not  break  them  on  the  way. 
The  noisy  domain  of  politics  is  closed  to  our  discussions,  but  in  every  other 
respect  we  have  entire  liberty.  From  day  to  day  grave  questions  are  mooted ; 
youug  philosophers  come  forward,  and  summon  Catholicism  to  render  an  ac- 
count of  its  doctrines  and  its  works,  and  then,  seizing  the  inspiration  of  the 
moment,  one  of  us  stands  up  and  meets  the  attack,  explains  the  Christian 
idea  which  is  misunderstood,  appeals  to  history  for  proofs  of  its  application, 
and  not  unfrequently,  warmed  on  to  eloquence  by  the  grandeur  of  the  subject, 
establishes,  on  a  solid  basis,  the  immortal  union  of  true  philosophy  with  faith. 
Needless  to  say,  it  is  not  theological  propositions  which  are  thus  dealt  with, 
but  merely  the  scientific  and  social  bearing  of  the  Gospel.  The  lists  are  open, 
and  opinions  of  every  shade  may  ascend  the  tribune.  As,  however,  the  Chris- 
tians are  equal  in  numbers  to  their  adversaries,  and  as,  on  the  other  hand, 
they  are  animated  by  more  order,  zeal,  and  assiduity,  it  is  nearly  always  in 
their  favor  that  the  victory  is  decided.  I  must  add,  that  the  frankest  cordial- 
ity reigns  amongst  us,  a  sort  of  real  fraternity ;  with  the  others  we  are  on 
terms  of  courtesy  and  good-will.  There  are  about  ten  of  us  Catholics  united 
in  a  closer  union  of  heart  and  mind,  a  sort  of  literary  knighthood,  all  devoted 
friends,  without  any  secrets  from  one  another,  but  who  share  all,  heart  to 
heart,  in  common  joys,  hopes,  and  sorrows. 

"  Sometimes,  when  the  air  is  balmy  and  the  night-breeze  soft,  and  the 
moonbeams  are  lighting  up  the  majestic  dome  of  the  Pantheon,  that  gnmd 
edifice  which  seems  about  to  lift  itself  to  the  skies,  and  whose  sximmit  has 
been  robbed  of  the  cross,  as  if  to  break  the  impetus  of  its  upward  flight- 
sometimes,  I  say,  the  sergent-de-ville  stops  on  his  beat  to  cast  an  unquiet  eye 
on  six  or  seven  young  men,  who,  arm-in-arm,  promenade  for  hours  together 
In  the  silent,  deserted  square.  Their  countenance  is  serene,  their  gait  mea- 
sured, their  conversation  full  of  enthusiasm,  of  sensibility  and  gladness. 
They  discourse  concerning  many  things  on  earth  and  in  Heaven  ;  they  speak 
of  God,  of  their  fathers,  of  friends  whom  they  have  left  at  the  old  fire- 
side ;  they  speak  of  their  country,  and  of  humanity.  The  stupid  Parisian 
who  elbows  them  as  he  hurries  on  to  his  pleasures  does  not  understand  their 
language;  it  is  a  dead  language  which  few  here  understand.  I,  who  was 
with  them,  understood  it,  and,  as  I  listened  to  them,  I  seemed  to  feel  my 
heart  expand  ;  I  felt  myself  a  man,  and,  weak  and  cowardly  as  I  am,  I  drew 
from  my  contact  with  them  some  moments  of  energy  for  the  morrow's  work. 
Another  source  of  life  to  us  are  the  soirees  of  the  young  and  gifted  Count  de 
If ontalembert ;  there  the  most  illustrious  champions  of  Catholicism  opes  to 


58  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

us  tha  rich  stores  of  their  conversation.  Some  are  to  be  seen  there  who  have 
fought  with  the  sword,  and  sealed  their  convictions  with  their  blood  :  there 
are  young  Polish  and  Belgian  officers,  and  distinguished  diplomatists  ;  then 
there  are  men  of  another  school,  who  come  like  pilgrims  from  another 
empire  to  contemplate  for  a  moment  the  spirit  of  union  and  gentleness  which 
reigns  amongst  their  adversaries  ;  there  in  turns  you  meet  MM.  Ballanche 
and  Sainte-Beuve,  Savigny  the  younger  and  Beauffort,  Ampere  fils  and 
Alfred  de  Vigny,  de  Mero  and  d'Ecstein.  ^Last  Sunday  Lherminier  was 
there.  I  even  chatted  a  moment  with  him  :  then  a  most  interesting  conver- 
sation was  started  between  him  and  M.  de  Montalembert ;  we  stayed  till  mid- 
night listening  to  them.  jVictor  Considerant  was  there  also  ;  a  great  deal 
was  said  about  the  misery  of  the  people  just  now  ;  it  is  considered  a  very  sad 
omen  for  the  future.  But  we  talk  politics  very  little,  and  science,  on  the 
other  hand,  a  great  deal.  M.  de  Montalembert  does  the  honors  with  won- 
derful grace.    He  talks  very  well,  and  is  remarkably  well-informed." 


CHAPTER  VIL 

But  while  the  Catholics  were  thus  drawing  together,  their 
adversaries  were  not  idle.  The  chairs  of  all  the  faculties  in 
Paris  resounded  daily  to  impious  and  insidious  attacks  on 
the  doctrines  of  Chrisiianity.  Not  satisfied  with  this,  the 
learned  Professors  had  recourse  to  calumny,  history  and 
experience  having  taught  them  that  it  generally  proves  a 
more  successful  weapon  against  truth  than  logic.  Every 
lecture  was  full  of  false  quotations  and  historical  inaccuracies, 
perfidiously  prepared  with  a  view  to  mislead  their  hearers  as 
to  the  fundamental  teaching  and  spirit  of  the  Gospel.  Oza- 
nam  was  a  daily  witness  of  this  disloyal  warfare,  and  it  fired 
him  with  indignation.  His  able  retort  to  Professor  Jouffroy  * 
had  had  the  effect  of  silencing  direct  attack  from  that  bril- 
liant psychologist  by  winning  his  personal  respect  for  the 
juvenile  champion  of  the  cause.  But  the  hostility  continued 
unabated  from  every  other  quarter.  Frederic  meantime  was 
pursued  by  the  idea  that  deeds,  not  speech,  should  be 
opposed  to  the  enemy.  "  It  is  all  very  well  talking  and 
arguing  and  holding  one's  own  against  them,  but  why  can 
we  not  i/o  somef/ii/ig  ^"  he  constantly  repeated.  Perhaps  the 
necessity  for  "doing  something"  was  in  a  certain  degree 
prompted  or  pressed  upon  him  by  the  St.  Simonians,  who,  in 
answer  to  their  defence  of  the  gospel,  continually  taunted 
him  and  his  party  with,  *'  Show  us  your  works !"  They 
admitted  the  past  grandeur  of  Christianity,  but  persisted  in 
declaring  that  it  was  now  a  dead  tree  that  bore  no  fruit. 

Even  the  historical  debates  of  the  Place  de  TEstrapade, 

•  Jouffroy,  on  his  death-bed,  ten  years  later,  returned  to  the  fafth  which  he  had  spent  the 
greater  part  of  his  life  in  attackinfr.  His  dying  words  to  a  phMosophcr  frieid.  wb.i  stood 
beside  him,  were,  "AH  the  systems  put  together  are  not  worth  one  page  of  the  Catechism  i" 

59       ^       ^       ^ 


6o  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

which  every  week  were  the  occasion  of  some  briUiant  display 
of  Frederic's  talent,  were  becoming  distasteful  to  him,  because 
their  character  was  merely  literary  and  rhetorical ;  they  were 
not  a  direct  effort  in  the  interests  of  truth ;  they  were  useful 
and  delightful,  but  quite  inadequate  to  the  service  of  truth  as 
he  understood  it. 

One  day,  after  taking  part  in  a  more  than  usually  fiery 
debate  on  some  historical  question,  he  left  the  conference- 
hall  in  company  with  two  friends,  M.  Lallier  and  M.  La- 
mache ;  they  walked  on  to  the  Hotel  Corneille,  where  the 
latter  resided,  discussing  as  they  went  what  could  be  done 
to  stir  up  the  Catholic  camp  to  more  strenuous  efforts,  and 
to  the  necessity  of  utilizing  these  weekly  meetings  for  some 
higher  purpose.  They  went  up  to  Lallier's  rooms  and  held  a 
long  consultation  as  to  what  could  be  done.  It  was  sug- 
gested that  the  leaders  should  contrive  to  meet  at  the  house 
of  one  or  other  of  them  every  week,  so  as  to  discuss  more 
exhaustively  the  points  it  was  essential  to  bring  out  against 
their  adversaries,  that  they  might  thus  arrive  at  the  meeting 
armed  efficiently,  and  prepared  all  along  the  line;  by  this 
means  also  they  would  gradually  bring  back  and  maintain  the 
debates  within  the  special  sphere  they  desired.  Ozanam 
mentioned  casually  in  the  course  of  the  conversation  that,  in 
discussing  the  matter  with  a  friend  the  day  before,  it  had 
occurred  to  them  it  might  be  possible  to  organize  a  meeting 
where  they  would  occupy  themselves  not  with  discussions 
but  with  good  works,  and  thus  oppose  a  practical  denial  to 
the  reproach  of  the  St.  Simonians.  The  suggestion  met  with 
no  immediate  response  from  his  two  companions,  but  it  had 
in  reality  dropped  unawares  the  seed  of  the  future  Society  of 
St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  Nothing  particular  was  decided  that 
day,  but  the  trio  parted  with  the  understanding  that  they 
were  to  convene  the  heads  of  their  party  at  an  early  date  for 
the  purpose  of  arranging  some  preparatory  discussions  for  the 
historical  debates. 

In  the  interval,  none  of  them  could  say  why  or  how  this 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  6i 

notion  of  an  exclusively  practical  meeting,  which  had  been 
incidentally  thrown  out  by  Ozanam,  grew  in  their  minds, 
while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  importance  of  the  proposed 
preparation  for  the  debates  insensibly  diminished.  They 
communicated  the  coincidence  to  each  other,  and  then  of  one 
accord  went  off  to  consult  Pere  Bailly.  He  saw  at  a  glance 
the  value  of  the  idea,  and  once  more  placed  the  office  of  the 
Tribune  Catholique  at  their  disposal. 

Here,  in  the  month  of  May,  1833,  they  held  their  first  meet^ 
ing.  They  begged  M.  Bailly  to  take  the  chair,  which  the 
dear  old  man  of  course  did,  together  with  the  tide  of  Presi- 
dent. He  had  as  yet  only  eight  members  to  preside  over; 
the  scheme  seemed  quite  Utopian  to  the  rest  of  the  party, 
who  s^ood  aloof  and  contented  themselves  with  wishing  suc- 
cess to  their  more  sanguine  and  energetic  companions. 

It  was  settled  at  the  very  first  meeting  that  their  work 
should  be  the  service  of  God  in  the  persons  of  the  poor,  whom 
they  were  to  visit  at  their  own  dwellings  and  assist  by  every 
means  in  their  power. 

"  If  you  intend  the  work  to  be  really  efficacious,"  said  M. 
Bailly,  "  if  you  are  in  earnest  about  serving  the  poor  as  well 
as  yourselves,  you  must  not  let  it  be  a  mere  doling  out  of 
alms,  bringing  each  your  pittance  of  money  or  food ;  you 
must  make  it  a  medium  of  moral  assistance,  you  must  give 
them  the  alms  of  good  advice  "  (Vaumone  de  la  direction). 

A  portion  of  the  very  greatest  misery  of  the  poor  often 
proceeds  from  their  not  knowing  how  to  help  themselves  out 
of  a  difficulty  once  they  have  got  into  it;  they  fall  into  dis- 
tress through  accidental  circumstances,  arising  from  their  own 
fault  or  other  people's,  and  they  are  too  ignorant  to  see  their 
way  out  of  it.  The  law  frequently  has  a  remedy  ready  for 
them,  but  they  don't  know  this,  and  there  is  no  one  to  tell 
them.  Their  one  idea  when  they  fall  into  distress  is  to  hold 
out  their  hand  for  an  alms,  a  system  which  generally  proves 
as  ineffectual  as  it  is  demoralizing.  M.  Bailly  suggested  to  his 
young  friends  that  they  should  try  to  remedy  this  lamentable 


62  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

state  of  things  by  placing  their  education,  their  intelligence, 
their  special  knowledge  of  law  or  science,  and  their  general 
knowledge  of  life,  at  the  disposal  of  the  poor;  that  instead  of 
only  taking  them  some  little  material  relief,  they  should  strive 
to  win  their  confidence,  learn  all  about  their  affairs,  and  then 
see  how  they  could  best  help  them  to  help  themselves. 
"  Most  of  you  are  studying  to  be  lawyers,"  he  said,  "  some  to 
be  doctors,  etc. ;  go  and  help  the  poor,  each  in  your  special 
line;  let  your  studies  be  of  use  to  others  as  well  as  to  your- 
selves; it  is  a  good  and  easy  way  of  commencing  your  apos- 
tolate  as  Christians  in  the  world." 

Ozanam  was  sitting  at  M.  Bailly's  right  hand,  and  one  of 
those  present  recalls  vividly  the  expression  of  his  countenance 
as,  with  his  black  eyes  aUght,  and  his  irregular,  expressive  fea- 
tures quivering  with  sympathy,  he  listened  to  the  Presfdent's 
words,  and  then  burst  out  into  joyous  assent.  The  idea  of 
this  aumoiie  de  la  direction  was  all  the  more  welcome  from  the 
fact  that  the  young  men  had  very  little  else  to  give.  They 
were  somewhat  perplexed  at  first  from  not  knowing  any  poor 
people  to  visit.  This  difficulty  was,  however,  easily  com- 
passed :  M.  Bailly  advised  them  to  go  off  to  that  beautiful, 
grand  soul,  Soeur  Rosalie,  and  ask  her  to  help  them.  She  re- 
ceived the  young  apostles  of  charity  like  the  mother  that  she 
was,  was  overjoyed  at  their  idea  of  the  moral  help  they  pro- 
posed, gave  them  much  valuable  advice  as  to  the  way  of 
dealing  with  her  beloved  poor,  and  a  list  of  needy  and  de- 
servingj  families  to  visit.  The  Society  was  of  course  too  poor 
to  have  bons  *  in  its  own  name,  so  Soeur  Rosalie  sold  them 
some  of  hers.  The  members  placed  themselves  under  the 
protection  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  whose  name  they  adopted, 
and  this  done  they  were  fairly  afloat.  Each  member  had  a 
poor  family  to  look  after ;  they  met  every  week  to  report 
their  experiences,  discuss  the  wants  of  their  protigis^  and 
the  means  of  relieving  them ;  the  meeting  began  and  ended 

*  Tickets  for  provisioos,  coal,  etc. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam.  63 

with  a  prayer,  and  a  collection  was  made  to  pay  for  the  bons. 
The  proceeds  of  the  collection  were,  as  may  be  imagined, 
exceedingly  small ;  but  by  and  by  the  members  were  mys- 
tified by  finding  four  five-franc  pieces  amongst  the  sous  and 
rare  little  silver  coins  that  were  dropped  into  the  leather 
bag.  Who  was  the  Croesus  in  disguise  who  contributed  this 
magnificent  sum  ?  M.  Bailly,  after  enjoying  their  curiosity 
for  a  while,  disclosed  the  secret.  He  was  in  the  habit  of  ask- 
ing Ozanam  and  one  or  two  of  the  others  to  review  books  for 
the  Tribune  Catholique^  and  as  they  naturally  scouted  the  idea 
of  being  paid  anything  by  that  most  disinterested  of  journals, 
the  editor  took  this  way  of  remunerating  them  according  to 
his  slender  means,  knowing  they  could  not  reject  it. 

The  rules  of  the  Society  were  simple  but  stringent.  It  was 
forbidden  to  discuss  politics  or  personal  concerns  at  the  meet- 
ings; these  topics  were  not  even  to  be  mentioned  indirectly; 
the  Society  was  never  to  be  made  use  of  as  a  stepping-stone 
to  worldly  advancement.  This  clause,  which  was  emphatically 
expressed,  seemed  rather  superfluous,  considering  how  remote 
the  chances  were  of  the  members  being  in  a  position  to  vio- 
late it ;  but  it  was  inserted  as  a  counterpart  to  the  Bonnes 
Etudes  on  which  the  historical  conferences  were  in  a  certain 
sense  grafted,  and  whose  members  were  pledged  to  help  each 
other  on  in  the  world.  Nothing  of  the  sort  was  to  be  tolerated 
in  the  new  confraternity;  no  selfish  principle  was  to  inspire  its 
action  ;  it  was  to  be  animated  only  by  charity,  by  love  of  God 
and  of  suffering  humanity,  without  any  kind  of  reference 
to  self.  The  same  spirit  was  to  preside  at  the  weekly  confer- 
ences ;  there  was  to  be  no  display  of  eloquence  or  learning,  no- 
thing but  the  reports  of  the  week  summed  up  in  a  business- 
like manner,  and  the  interests  of  the  poor  discussed  in  brief 
and  simple  language. 

The  service  of  the  members  embraced  the  sick  and  infirm, 
and  those  who  were  out  of  work  from  some  just  cause,  either 
illness  or  external  conditions  not  of  their  own  making ;  every 
precaution  was  taken  against  the  help  of  the  Society  being  di- 


64  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

verted  into  unworthy  channels,  and  serving  as  an  encourage- 
ment to  idleness  and  pauperism. 

Ozanam's  first  personal  experience  was  a  striking  illustration 
of  the  wisdom  of  M.  Bailly's  advice  as  to  the  way  they  should 
practise  charity.  There  fell  to  his  lot  a  poor  mhtage^  composed 
of  a  hard-working  mother  with  five  children,  and  a  drunken 
husband,  who  beat  them  all  round,  though,  as  the  wife  con- 
scientiously explained,  "  not  every  day,  only  from  time  to 
time."  But  what  he  never  failed  to  do  was  to  drag  every 
penny  of  the  poor  creature's  earnings  from  her  and  spend 
it  at  the  tavern,  while  she  and  the  five  children  starved  at 
home.  She  was  in  the  last  stage  of  misery  and  despair  when 
Ozanam  found  her  out.  He  quickly  discovered  that  the  sup- 
posed marriage  was  no  marriage  at  all,  and  that  mother 
and  children  were  free  to  leave  their  brutal  master  if  they 
chose.  Her  astonishment  on  hearing  this  was  only  equalled 
by  her  thankfulness.  At  first  she  could  not  believe  it ;  in  her 
complete  ignorance  of  law  and  morals,  she  saw  no  reason  why 
it  should  be  so.  Ozanam  had  to  go  to  the  Procureur  du  Roi 
(Attorney-General)  and  bring  her  a  written  opinion  stating 
the  fact  in  legal  form  before  her  incredulity  was  overcome. 
She  then  gladly  accepted  her  protector's  offer  to  remove  with 
her  half-starved  family  to  another  room  out  of  the  house  of 
their  tormentor.  The  fury  of  the  latter  was  very  great  on  dis- 
covering that  his  means  of  living  and  drinking  were  thus 
suddenly  taken  from  him,  and  he  threatened  all  sorts  of  vio- 
lence. Ozanam  got  an  order  from  the  police  for  him  to  quit 
Paris,  but  the  woman,  hearing  of  this,  entreated  that  he  might 
be  rather  forbidden  to  leave  it,  and  that  she  and  the  two 
youngest  children  might  be  sent  on  to  Brittany,  where  her 
mother  lived,  and  would  gladly  receive  them.  This  was  ac- 
cordingly done.  Ozanam  made  a  collection,  which  in  a  few 
days  produced  the  necessary  money  for  the  journey,  and  they 
set  off  as  happy  as  birds  set  free.  The  two  eldest  boys,  little 
fellows  of  eleven  and  twelve,  were  employed  in  M.  Bailly's 
printing-office,  and  taken  care  of  at  his  house.     This  was  the 


Life  and  ll^orks  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  65 

Deginning  of  tliose  patronages  which   are  now  established  in 
every  parish  in  Paris,  and  almost  in  France. 

At  first  the  eight  members  thought  to  limit  the  confraternity 
to  themselves,  fearing  that  the  simplicity  of  its  design  might 
suffer  if  new-comers  were  admitted,  and  that  the  humble  little 
society  might  grow  into  a  bustling,  official  organization.  M. 
Bailly,  however,  was  of  a  different  opinion,  and  declared  that 
the  work  must  expand  and  grow;  accordingly,  on  certain 
stringent  conditions,  a  i^vf  new  members  were  admitted.  One 
of  them,  for  a  time,  repeated  the  trick  of  the  President,  drop- 
ping splendid  alms,  in  the  shape  of  five-franc  pieces,  into  the 
bag.  He  was  found  out  and  commended  for  his  modesty,  as 
well  as  for  his  self-denial  in  conforming  to  the  rule,  which  for- 
bade a  member,  however  rich,  to  give  any  alms  to  the  family 
he  visited,  except  what  was  supplied  from  the  general  fund. 
Such  were  the  small  beginnings  of  the  great  brotherhood  of 
St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  Twenty  years  afterwards,*  Ozanam, 
inaugurating  a  new  Conference  at  Florence,  thus  relates  its 
early  history  and  unexpected  progress : 

"We  were  just  then  invaded  by  a  delug^e  of  heterodox  and  philosophical 
doctrines  that  were  clashing  all  round  us,  and  we  felt  the  need  of  strenjjthen- 
ing  our  faith  in  the  midst  of  the  assaults  made  upon  it  by  the  various  systems 
of  false  science.  Some  of  our  fellow-students  were  Materialists,  others  Si- 
monians,  others  Fourierists,  others  Deists.  When  we  Catholics  sought  to  call 
the  attention  of  these  wandering  brothers  to  the  marvels  of  Christianity,  they 
said  to  us,  ♦  Yes,  you  have  a  right  to  speak  of  the  past.  In  bygone  days 
Christianity  did  indeed  work  wonders,  but  to-day  Christianity  is  dead.  And 
you,  who  boast  of  being  Catholics,  what  do  you  do  ?  What  works  can  you 
show  which  prove  your  faith,  and  can  claim  to  make  us  respect  and  acknow- 
ledge it?'  And  they  were  right ;  the  reproach  was  but  too  well  merited. 
Then  it  was  that  we  said  to  one  another,  '  Let  us  to  the  front  I  Let  our  deeds 
be  in  accordance  with  our  faith,'  But  what  were  we  to  do  ?  What  could  we 
do  to  prove  ourselves  true  Catholics  except  that  which  pleases  God  most  ? 
Succor  our  neighbor,  as  Jesus  Christ  did,  and  place  our  faith  under  the  safe- 
guard of  charity. 

"  Eight  of  us  united  in  this  idea,  and  at  first,  as  if  jealous  of  our  new-found 
treasure,  we  would  not  open  the  door  of  our  little  assembly  to  any  one  else. 
But  God  had  other  views  with  respect  to  us.  The  association  of  a  few  inti- 
mate  friends  became,  in  His  designs,  the  nucleus  of  an  immense  family  of 


66  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

brothers  that  was  to  spread  over  a  great  part  of  Europe.  You  see  that  we 
cannot  with  truth  take  the  title  of  founders,  for  it  was  God  who  willed  and 
who  founded  our  society. 

"I  remember  that  in  the  beginning  one  of  my  own  friends,  for  a  moment 
misled  by  the  theories  of  the  St.  Siraonians,  said  to  me  with  a  sort  of  pity, 
♦  But  what  do  you  hope  to  do  ?  You  are  only  eight  poor  young  fellows,  and 
you  expect  to  relieve  the  misery  that  swarms  in  a  city  like  Paris  !  Why,  if  you 
counted  any  number  of  members  you  could  do  but  comparatively  nothing  I 
We,  on  the  contrary,  are  elaborating  ideas  and  a  new  system  which  will  re- 
form the  world  and  banish  misery  from  it  altogether !  We  shall  do  for  hu- 
manity in  a  moment  what  you  could  not  accomplish  in  several  centuries.'  " 

Nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century  had  gone  by  when  Ozanam 
related  this;  the  St.  Simonians  had  died  away,  and  with  them 
the  transcendental  theories  which  were  to  transfigure  the 
world,  while  the  "  eight  poor  fellows  "  whom  they  despised  as 
lunatics  had  increased  to  two  thousand  in  Paris  alone,  where 
they  visited  five  thousand  poor  families,  or  an  average  of 
twenty  thousand  individuals,  which  represented  one-fourth  of 
the  poor  of  that  vast  city.  The  conferences  in  France  num- 
bered five  hundred,  and  there  were  others  established  in  Eng-, 
land,  Belgium,  Spain,  America,  so  far  off  even  as  Jerusalem. 
Thus  had  the  grain  of  mustard-seed,  the  smallest  of  all  seeds, 
sprung  up  into  a  great  tree,  beneath  whose  branches  a  multi- 
tude of  wayfarers  found  comfort  and  shade. 

Ozanam  always  repudiated  the  tide  of  founder  of  tlie  soci- 
ety— "  We  were  eight,"  he  would  affirm  emphatically  ;  never- 
theless the  title  and  the  glory  have  clung  to  him  whom  the 
others  looked  upon  as  their  leader  and  the  animating  spirit 
of  their  efforts.  He  deprecated  the  idea  of  its  having  a 
"  founder  "  at  all,  or  of  laying  any  stress  on  the  human  in- 
strumentality in  works  of  the  kind  generally.  "  I  firmly  be- 
lieve," he  says,  *'that  the  most  solid  institutions  are  not 
those  which  man  creates  after  his  own  fashion,  with  a  delibe- 
rate purpose,  and  with  elements  of  his  own  creation,  but  those 
which  spring,  as  it  were,  from  circumstances,  and  out  of  ele- 
ments already  existing." 

About  one  month  after  the  bjrth  of  the  society,  its  members 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatianu  6j 

publicly  unfurled  their  banner  by  a  courageous  act   of  faith, 

which  Ozanam  thus  deacribcs  to  his  motiier: 

"June  19, 1833. 

" .  .  .  If  I  were  to  tell  you  that  on  the  Feast  of  Corpus  Christi  three 
harebrained  young  gentlemen  sallied  forth  from  Paris  by  the  Champs  Ely- 
sees,  at  eight  o'clock  in  the  morning,  I  should  probably  excite  your  curiosity  ; 
if  I  announced  to  you  that  at  ten  o'clock  thirty  students  were  following  the 
procession  at  Nanterre,  I  should  no  doubt  edify  your  piety  ;  if  I  were  to  add 
^hat  at  six  o'clock  in  the  evening  two-and-twenty  of  the  said  students  were 
comforting  the  inward  man  round  a  table  at  St.  Germain-en-Laye,  I  siiould 
mystify  you  still  more  ;  finally,  if  I  confided  to  you  that  on  the  stroke  of  mid 
night,  or  thereabouts,  three  youtiis  knocked  at  the  door  of  No.  7  Rue  des 
Ores,*  that  they  were  all  three  in  high  good-humor,  that  their  legs  were 
shaky,  and  their  shoes  covered  with  dust,  and  that,  moreover,  one  of  the  three 
rejoices  in  chestnut  locks  and  a  broad  nose  and  gray  eyes,  which  are  not  quite 
unknown  to  you — if  I  were  to  relate  all  this,  my  good  little  mother,  what 
would  you  say  ?  You  would  most  certainly  cry  out,  '  Halloa  1  this  looks  very 
like  a  dangerous  lark  ! '  Well,  now  I  see  that  I  have  struck  the  right  chord, 
and  lighted  on  one  day  in  the  year  whose  history  is  safe  to  interest  you, 

•'  You  know  that  in  Paris,  as  at  Lyons,  religious  processions  are  prohibited  ; 
but  it  does  not  follow  that  because  a  certain  number  of  roughs  choose  to  pen 
up  Catholicism  in  its  temples  in  the  great  cities,  we  young  CathoUcs  should 
be  deprived  of  one  of  the  most  touching  ceremonials  of  our  religion  ;  accord- 
ingly, some  of  us  determined  to  follow  the  procession  at  Nanterre,  the  quietest 
of  little  villages,  the  birthplace  of  the  gentle  St.  Genevieve. 

"  Sunday  dawned  serene  and  cloudless,  as  if  heaven  intended  to  adorn  the 
festival  with  its  own  splendor.  I  set  off  early  with  two  friends,  and  we 
arrived  the  first  at  the  humble  rendezvous.  By  degrees  the  little  group  in- 
creased, and  we  were  soon  thirty.  First  came  ail  the  intellectual  aristocracy 
of  the  Conference— Lallier,  Lamache,  Cherruel,  a  converted  St.  Simonian,  de 
la  None,  who  writes  such  charming  verses  ;  then  came  natives  of  Languedoc, 
of  Franche-comte,  Normans,  and  last,  but  not  least,  Lyonnese  ;  several  wore 
moustaches,  and  six  of  the  band  measured  five  feet  eight  inches.  We  dispersed 
and  fell  in  with  the  peasants  who  followed  the  canopy  ;  it  was  such  a  pleasure 
to  elbow  these  good  people,  to  sing  with  them,  and  to  see  their  naive  astonish- 
ment at  our  fine  appearance  and  our  piety  1  The  procession  was  ntimerous, 
and  the  decorations  full  of  simple  elegance  ;  all  the  houses  were  festooned, 
and  the  roads  strewn  with  flowers.  The  faith  and  piety  that  we  beheld  on  all 
sides  it  would  be  difficult  to  describe.  Some  venerable  old  men,  who  were 
too  feeble  to  walk  In  the  procession,  waited  at  the  threshold  of  their  doors  for 
it  to  pass ;  it  was  principally  in  front  of  their  houses  that  the  altars  were 
erected.  The  ceremony  lasted  nearly  two  hours.  Then  we  assisted  at  High 
Mass,  where  the  crowd  overflowed  from  the  open  church  doors  into  the  street. 
When  it  was  all  over,  Henri,  I  think,  proposed  that  we  should  go  and  dine  at 

•  The  house  where  Frederic  lodged  after  leaving  M.  Amp^'f. 


68  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

St.  Germain.  Six  or  eight  poltroons  cried  out  about  the  distance  ;  we  let  them 
cry  and  turn  their  steps  towards  home,  and  the  remaining  twenty-two,  in 
groups  of  three  or  four  only,  so  as  not  to  make  any  disturbance,  set  forth, 
kicking  up  the  dust  on  the  road  to  St.  Germain.  Pleasure  gave  wings  to  our 
heels  ;  we  gathered  wild  strawberries  in  the  woods  as  we  went,  and  in  due  time 
arrived  at  the  end  of  our  walk.  We  went  into  the  church  for  a  quarter  of  an 
hour  while  vespers  were  going  on,  then  we  visited  the  grand  old  castle,  so  rich  ia 
memories,  so  proud  of  its  antiquity, 

"  Then,  having  disported  ourselves  some  time  on  the  terrace,,  we  took  our- 
selves off  to  a  worthy  innkeeper,  who  undertook  to  spread  the  board  for  forty 
sous  a  head.  Here  comes  the  ticklish  part  of  the  day's  entertainment  I  How 
many  heroes  have  been  conquered  by  the  seductions  of  the  dessert  1  How  many 
sages  have  seen  their  wisdom  break  like  brittle  glass  at  the  contact  of  the  foam- 
ing bottle  of  champagne  !  We  were  wise  enough  to  flee  the  temptation  ;  the 
modest  Maconnais,  doubly  baptized  by  mine  host  and  his  guests,  was  the  only 
wine  admitted  to  the  feast.  So,  dear  mother,  no  one  rolled  under  the  table, 
nobody  burdened  the  shoulders  of  any  one  else  with  a  melancholy  load  t  We 
started  homewards  in  the  cool  of  the  evening.  The  moon  rose  presently,  and 
lighted  us  through  the  forest.  It  was  a  dehcious  hour.  ...  As  night 
closed  in  we  lost  sight  of  each  other ;  some  took  the  omnibus  at  Neuilly ; 
two  of  my  comrades  walked  with  me  to  my  own  door.  Monday  had  begun. 
Only  my  heart  can  tell  how  often  I  thought  of  you  during  this  day,  one  of  the 
most  charming  of  my  life." 

This  brave  manifestation  on  the  part  of  the  Catholic  stu- 
dents was  not  without  its  effect,  and  it  was  significant  of  the 
ground  they  had  gained  that  although  the  adventure  was 
quickly  circulated  through  the  ranks,  not  a  single  word  of  ridi- 
cule was  spoken  about  it  or  the  bold  young  confessors. 

But  these  humble  individual  protests  did  not  satisfy  Oza- 
nam. He  felt  that,  as  the  evil  was  greatest  amongst  the 
most  cultivated  intellectual  classes,  it  should  be  attacked 
there  before  any  deep  or  lasting  reform  could  be  hoped  for. 
For  this  warfare,  however,  a  powerful  and  brilliant  champion 
was  needed,  and  where  was  he  to  be  found  ? 

God,  meanwhile,  was  preparing  His  weapon. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 
1834. 

The  history  of  the  Church  offers  no  parallel  to  the  fall  of 
M.  lie  Lamenijais  and  the  scatiering  of  the  brilliant  galaxy  of 
writers  and  orators  of  which  that  misguiding  star  had  made 
itself  the  centre.  His  disciples,  stunned  at  first,  could  hardly 
believe  in  so  great  a  fall.  They  strove  to  arrest  the  master  on 
the  brink  of  the  abyss,  pleading  with  him  like  children  striving 
to  save  a  father  from  suicide  ;  they  left  nothing  untried — re- 
monstrance, entreaties,  caresses;  they  clung  to  him  to  the 
last ;  then,  seeing  that  all  was  in  vain,  they  left  him  sorrow- 
fully, and  each  went  his  way. 

Tlie  Abb^  Gerbet  withdrew  into  solitude,  and  in  course  of 
time  gave  to  the  world  those  works  which,  for  suavity  and 
grace,  have  been  so  often  likened  to  the  style  of  F6nelon. 

M.  de  Montalembert  had  plunged  into  the  dusky  shadows 
of  Benedictine  lore,  from  wliich  he  was  one  day  to  emerge, 
holding  in  his  hand  the  Life  of  St.  Elizabeth,  that  incompara- 
ble story  where  the  delicate  graces  of  an  artist  and  the  kind- 
ling enthusiasm  of  a  biographer  are  blended  with  the  rigid 
accuracy  of  an  historian. 

Tlie  Abb6  Lacordaire,  after  a  period  of  seclusion  and  study, 
was  the  first  to  stand  forth  once  more  in  pubHc  Hfe — public  at 
least  compared  with  the  profound  isolation  which  had  pre- 
ceded it. 

The  history  of  the  great  Dominican  has  been  amply  writ- 
ten, and  is  already  familiar  to  the  greater  number  of  our 
readers ;  but  they  may  not  be  so  generally  aware  that  a  por- 
tion of  his  career,  its  most  brilliant  one,  was  closely,  though 
silently,   connected   with   Frederic   Ozanam.      We  are  not, 


70  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

therefore,  straying  from  our  subject  by  a  digression  which 
tends  to  show  that  Ozanam's  influence  touched  the  destinies 
of  the  orator  whose  genius  and  sanctity  may  have  had  their 
own  share  in  influencing  the  destinies  of  France. 

The  anti-Christian  spirit  which  Ozanam  and  his  Httle  army 
were  combating  so  strenuously  was  deep-seated  as  ever  in  those 
higii  centres  where  the  youth  of  France  came  to  look  for  intel- 
Ijctual  guidance  and  inspiration.  The  Sorbonne  had  been 
more  guarded  in  its  utterances  of  late,  but  its  plulosophy  was 
none  the  less  deeply  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  infidehty. 
Jouflroy  and  his  colleagues  were  steadily  carrying  on  the  cru- 
sade of  Atheism  against  God,  of  Voltairianism  and  rational- 
ism against  the  Gospel.  What  was  needed  to  cope  with 
these  men  was  a  theologian,  who  was  at  the  same  time  a  man 
of  genius,  who  would  unite  science  and  learning  and  eloquence 
to  faith,  and  would  thus  have  sufficient  prestige,  in  the  first  in- 
stance, to  gain  a  hearing  for  an  unpopular  subject.  Ozanam  felt 
that  this  was  the  only  remedy  which  could  be  applied  with  any 
chance  of  success.  One  day,  on  coming  out  of  the  Sorbonne 
from  one  of  these  displays  of  sophistry  and  false  science,  he 
observed  to  a  companion,  "  What  we  want  is  a  man  of  the  pre- 
sent time,  young  like  ourselves,  whose  ideas  sympathize  with 
ours,  that  is,  with  the  aspirations  and  struggles  of  the  young  men 
of  our  day."  Where  was  this  man,  this  theologian  uniting  elo- 
quence, holiness,  learning,  science,  and  modern  sympa- 
thies, to  be  found  ?  There  were  able  and  eloquent  divines 
amongst  the  clergy  of  Paris,  but  they  were  all  elderly,  most 
of  them  old  men,  and  all  cast  in  the  venerable  but  antique 
mould  of  St.  Sulpice,  which  had  given  so  many  learned  and 
devout  priests  to  France,  but  which,  if  we  may  apply  so  un- 
seemly a  word  to  such  a  subject,  had  gone  out  of  fashion. 
Their  mode  of  preaching  belonged  to  a  period  that  had 
passed  away ;  the  young  sceptics  and  sophists  of  the  day 
were  not  to  be  lured  into  the  churches  by  sermons  which  they 
knew  would  be  cast  in  the  identical  form  the  world  had  been 
used   to  for  generations  and  grown  tired  of;  they  did  not 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  7 1 

care  about  Christian  doctrine,  and  would  listen  to  no  exposi- 
tion of  truths  they  had  ceased  to  believe  in,  unless  it  was  pre- 
sented to  them  in  the  guise  of  some  attractive  novelty ;  for  it 
was  simply  a  question  of  preaching  the  gospel  to  a  generation 
which  was  practically  as  ignorant  of  it  as,  and  more  antagonis- 
tic than,  the  Gentiles  whom  the  twelve  apostles  went  forth  to 
evangelize.  It  was  not  a  question,  as  in  the  middle  ages,  or 
even  the  seventeenth  century,  of  converting  men  to  repent- 
ance, of  waking  them  up  to  the  terrors  of  God's  wrath;  the 
very  foundations  for  such  an  apostolate  no  longer  existed; 
there  was,  so  to  speak,  no  basis  of  operation  for  it.  If  Bos- 
suet  himself  had  come  back  to  Hfe  and  preached  the  glowing 
sermons  which  electrified  the  dissolute  court  of  Louis  Quar- 
torze,  he  would  have  produced  no  effect  on  the  sceptics  of  the 
nineteenth  century  beyond  exciting  their  admiration  of  his 
eloquence ;  his  thunders  would  have  waked  no  more  echo  in 
their  souls  than  the  roaring  of  the  lion  does  from  the  trees  of 
the  forest.  What  did  it  avail  to  draw  vivid  pictures  of  the 
last  day,  of  hell  and  judgment,  and  the  wrath  of  an  angry 
God,  before  the  eyes  of  men  who  n^d  ceased,  and  whose 
fathers  had  ceased,  to  believe  in  those  awful  truths,  who  ac- 
knowledged no  God  but  their  own  bodies,  and  bowed  to  no 
divinity  but  their  own  reason?  It  had  all  to  be  begun  from 
the  very  beginning,  and  it  must  be  done  by  one  whose  voice 
was  attuned  to  the  spirit  of  the  century,  while  faith  lifted  him 
beyond  it  and  above  it. 

Henri  Lacordaire  was  essentially  a  child  of  this  sceptical 
age;  the  burning  breath  of  unbelief  had  swept  over  his  soul, 
and  for  a  few  young,  precious  years  dried  up  the  fountains  of 
faith,  until  a  touch  from  the  finger  of  God  caused  the  waters 
to  gush  forth  purer  and  more  abundant  than  ever.  The  ex- 
perience had  been  full  of  peril,  but  it  had  done  its  work,  anh 
lefl  behind  it,  in  Lacordaire's  heart,  a  bond  of  sympathy  and 
intelligence  wiih  those  undergoing  the  same  trial  which  con- 
stituted, to  the  last,  one  of  his  most  persuasive  arms. 

His  first  oratorical  successes  were  achieved  in  Paris  in  the 


72  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam» 

chapd  of  the  College  Stanislas,  where  the  superior,  the  Abb6 
Buquet,  had  invited  him  to  come  and  address  the  pupils.  He 
also  preached  a  sermon  at  St.  Roch,  but  it  was  written  out 
and  composed  after  the  usual  model  of  sermons,  and  proved 
a  complete  failure.  Every  one  left  the  church  saying,  ''  The 
Abbe  Lacordaire  will  never  be  a  preacher."  He  thought  so 
himself.  "  It  is  clear  to  me  that  I  have  not  sufficient  physical 
power,  nor  sufficient  flexibility  of  mind,  nor  sufficient  compre- 
hension of  the  world,  where  I  have  always  lived  and  always 
shall  live  in  solitude — in  a  word,  sufficient  of  anything  that 
goes  to  make  a  preacher  in  the  real  sense  of  the  word."*  At 
the  same  time  his  impromptu  discourses  in  the  College  Chapel 
met  with  a  success  that  filled  him  with  consolation.  "  The 
young  suit  me,"  he  writes ;  "  whenever  I  have  been  called 
upon  to  address  them  in  our  college  chapels,  I  have  done  some 
good."  And  he  adds  to  M.  de  Montalembert,  "  If  I  am  ever 
destined  to  utilize  my  powers  for  the  Church,  it  must  be  in  the 
apologetical  style — that  is  to  say,  in  that  form  which  gathers 
up  the  glories  and  beauties  of  the  history  and  polemics  of  re- 
ligion in  order  to  exalt  Christianity  in  the  minds  of  the  hear- 
ers, and  by  this  means  compel  their  belief  in  it."  Ozanam, 
who  had  heard  the  Abbe  Lacordaire  at  Stanislas,  drew  pre- 
cisely the  same  conclusion  as  to  the  direction  of  his  gifts  and 
the  nature  of  his  mission.  "  There  is  the  man  we  want  to 
confound  Jouffioy  and  his  school !  "  he  cried  on  issuing  from 
one  of  these  wonderful  improvisations.  Here  was  the  man  he 
had  dreamed  of  and  longed  for  as  the  champion  of  the  Gospel 
against  the  infidels  and  sophists  of  the  Sorbonne.  And  im- 
mediately the  thought  occurred  to  him  that  if  they  could  ob- 
tain from  the  Archbishop  of  Paris  a  series,  not  of  sermons, 
but  of  conferences  at  Notre  Dame  by  the  Abb6  Lacordaire  it 
would  be  a  glorious  gain. 

He  confided  this  idea  to  two  law  students,  great  friends  of 
his,  M.  Lejouteux  and  M.  de  Montazet ;  they  fell  in  with  it 
enthusiastically,  and,  with  that  delightful  spontaneity  of  youth 
♦  Letter  to  Ml  Lorrain,  6  Mai,  1833. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  73 

which  believes  in  all  it  hopes,  they  settled  off-hand  to  go  next 
day  and  propose  the  thing  to  Monseigneur  de  Qu^len. 

The  Archbishop  was  then  lodging  at  the  convent  of  Les 
Dames  de  St.  Michel,  Rue  St.  Jacques,  his  palace  having 
been  burned  down  in  the  Revolution  of  1830. 

Monseigneur  de  Qu61en  was  the  type  of  a  noble  ecclesias- 
tic, gracious,  simple,  and  possessing  at  the  same  time  a  state- 
liness  of  demeanor  and  a  dignity  of  manner  which  commanded 
admiration  and  inspired  respect.  He  received  the  three  young 
men  with  great  kindness,  listened  to  them  with  interest,  and 
promised  to  give  their  proposal  immediate  thought  He  ex- 
plained to  them,  at  the  same  time,  that  he  saw  grave  .Lnpedi- 
ments  in  the  way.  Emboldened  by  his  condescension,  they 
urged  the  state  of  public  feeling,  the  absolute  need  of  apply- 
ing a  remedy  to  the  prevailing  hostility  towards  religion,  and 
at  last  ventured  timidly  to  mention  the  Abb6  Lacordaire  as 
the  man  most  fitted  for  their  design.  Monseigneur  de  Qu6- 
len  agreed  with  their  views,  and  acknowledged  the  talent  of 
their  candidate,  but  still  replied  that  there  were  many  points 
to  be  considered  before  he  could  decide  upon  inaugurating  a 
novelty  such  as  they  proposed.  He  conversed  with  them 
some  time,  and,  while  lamenting  the  infidelity  and  impiety  of 
the  times,  declared  that  he  was  persuaded  the  dawn  of  a 
better  day  was  at  hand,  and  that  they  would  live  to  see  reli- 
gion come  triumphantly  out  of  the  present  struggle. 

*' Yes,"  he  added  impressively,  "  I  have  the  conviction  that 
a  crisis  is  at  hand,  and  that  God  is  preparing  for  Himself  a 
signal  victory." 

He  took  leave  of  the  three  youths  with  emotion,  gave  them 
his  blessing,  and  then  clasping  their  three  heads  in  one  em- 
brace, he  said,  « I  embrace  all  the  Catholic  youth  of  France 
in  your  persons." 

They  went  away  very  much  elated  by  the  half  promise 
that  had  been  held  out  to  them.  The  impetus  was  now 
given,  and  the  scheme  must  work  its  own  way  on  to  final 
accomplishment.     The  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  took  it 


74  Life  attd  Works  of  Frederic  Ozattam. 

up  with  the  ardor  of  youthful  neophytes,  and  the  project  grew 
in  possibihty  from  being  discussed  on  all  sides. 

The  Abbe  Lacordaire,  meantime,  heard  nothing  of  the 
plan  which  concerned  him  so  closely.  He  was  just  then  liv. 
ing  in  a  convent  situated  in  the  remotest  part  of  Paris,  plunged 
in  study,  and  as  much  aloof  from  the  movement  fermenting 
outside  his  room  as  if  he  had  been  buried  in  La  Trappe.  He 
was  disturbed  one  day  in  his  studious  retreat  by  the  Abbe 
Buquet,  who  had  been  much  struck  by  the  extraordinary 
effect  which  his  itw  previous  exhortations  had  produced  on 
the  pupils  of  the  College  Stanislas,  and  who  came  now  to  beg 
him  to  undertake  a  regular  course  of  *'  conferences  "  in  their 
chapel.  Lacordaire,  who  believed  that  this  was  precisely 
his  appointed  mission,  consented  at  once.  Ozanam  and  his 
friends  knew  nothing  either  of  this  proposal  or  its  acceptance; 
but  they  still  held  to  their  idea  that  the  Abbe  Lacordaire  was 
the  man  who  should  inaugurate  the  Conferences  of  Notre 
Dame;  accordingly,  just  ten  days  before  he  began  his  lectures 
at  the  college,  Frederic  determined  to  make  another  attempt 
with  the  Archbishop.  He  himself  drew  up  a  petition,  ran 
about  Paris  till  he  got  the  signatures  of  two  hundred  Catholic 
students  appended  to  it,  and,  accompanied  this  time  by  his 
friends  Lallier  and  Lamache,  set  out  once  more  to  the  Rue 
St.  Jacques. 

Ozanam  passed  all  his  life  for  being  extremely  shy  and 
timid,  but  in  reality  he  was  neither ;  he  was  too  innately  sim- 
ple to  be  shy  in  the  ordinary  sense,  and  his  apparent  timidity 
was  but  an  excess  of  modesty  which  made  him  keep  in  the 
background  while  there  was  any  one  else  to  take  the  initia- 
tive, but  when  he  was  called  upon  to  do  it,  he  did  so  with 
perfect  self-possession. 

The  Archbishop  received  him  and  his  companions  with  even 
greater  cordiality  than  on  Frederic's  first  visit,  encouraged  the 
latter  to  speak  freely,  and  was  impressed  by  the  clearness  and 
depth  of  his  views,  his  judgment  of  the  times,  their  necessities 
and  characteristics.      The  sagacity  he  displayed  would  have 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  75 

been  remarkable  in  a  man  of  mature  years;  in  a  boy  of 
rri^enty  it  was  surprising.  Monseigneur  de  Quelen  assured 
him  that  he  had  not  forgotten  their  conversation  of  eight 
months  past;  that  he  had  turned  the  subject  in  his  mind, 
and  had  determined  to  have  a  course  of  sermons  preached 
at  Notre  Dame  by  the  best  preachers  of  the  day. 

But  this  was  not  what  the  young  men  wanted.  The 
audience  they  wished  to  reach  would  never  go  to  a  sermon ;  / 
the  name  in  itself  would  be  a  repellent  force,  no  matter  how 
able  the  preacher  might  be.  What  the  petitioners  wanted  was 
something  entirely  out  of  the  beaten  track — lectures  or  con- 
ferences where  the  vital  questions  then  agitating  the  schools 
would  be  handled  in  a  brilliant  and  polemical  manner,  where 
religion  would  be  presented  in  its  relations  with  society,  and 
where  the  teaching  of  the  anti- Christian  press  and  periodicals 
of  France  and  Germany  would  be  indirectly  met  and  com- 
bated. No  man  of  the  present  day,  Ozanam  urged,  was  so 
qualified  for  this  mission  as  the  Abbe  Lacordaire.  He  was 
well  known  to  the  public  through  the  lawsuit  before  the 
Chamber  of  Peers,  where,  in  company  with  M.  de  Montalem- 
bert,  he  had  displayed  such  magnificent  forensic  talent.  He 
held  the  popular  sympathies  more  than  any  ecclesiastic  in 
France,  and  he  was  esteemed  by  Catholics  as  a  devout,  dis- 
interested, and  zealous  priest. 

Monseigneur  de  Quelen  admitted  all  this,  but  still  he  hesi- 
tated. At  last,  pressed  into  a  corner  by  the  entreating  of  the 
young  men,  he  said  he  thought  he  saw  a  way  of  satisfying 
them,  and  that  he  would  certainly  do  something.  As  he  spoke 
the  door  opened,  and  M.  de  Lamennais  was  announced. 

The  fears  which  for  a  moment  had  filled  the  hearts  of  the 
great  journalist's  disciples  were  lulled  of  late ;  no  one  dreamed 
that  M.  de  Lamennais  was  at  heart  a  traitor,  and  on  the  eve 
of  stabbing  the  Church  with  a  parricidal  hand;  still,  consider- 
ing recent  events,  the  extreme  cordiality  of  the  Archbishop's 
greeting  caused  some  little  surprise  to  Frederic  and  his  com- 
panions.    He  ran  forward  and  embraced  M.  de  Lamennais, 


76  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozariam. 

and  then,  still  holding  him  by  the  hand,  he  said,  turning  to 
the  young  men,  "  Gentlemen,  here  is  the  man  who  would 
suit  you.  Ah  !  if  the  feebleness  of  his  voice  would  only  per- 
mit him  to  preach,  we  should  have  to  throw  open  the  great 
doors  to  let  in  the  crowd,  and  even  then  the  Cathedral  would 
not  be  vast  enough  to  hold  the  numbers  who  would  flock 
round  his  pulpit !  " 

*'  Alas !  Monseigneur,  my  career  is  ended,"  replied  M.  de 
Lamennais  sadly. 

It  was  indeed  ended — Monseigneur  de  Quelen  little  guessed 
how  fatally.  He  little  dreamed,  while  thus  lavishing  marks 
of  confidence  and  esteem  on  that  brilliant  genius,  and  desig- 
nating him  to  the  youth  of  France  as  the  powerful  and  ac- 
credited champion  of  the  faith,  M.  de  Lamennais  had  already 
sent  the  MS.  of  his  Paroles  d'un  Croyant  to  M.  de  Sainte- 
Beuve,  begging  him  to  hurry  on  the  publication  as  quickly  as 
possible ;  and  yet  for  at  least  a  fortnight  after  this  he  kept  up 
the  semblance  of  submission  to  the  Holy  See,  and  outward 
deference  to  its  representatives.  His  mere  presence  at  the 
Archbishop's  on  this  day  was  an  act  of  treason,  and  the  mo- 
tive of  the  visit  still  remains  unknown. 

The  young  men  withdrew,  leaving  their  petition  in  the 
hands  of  his  Grace.  They  had  done  it  all  very  quietly ;  no 
one  but  themselves  knew  of  the  visit.  Their  surprise  and 
vexation  may  therefore  be  imagined  on  reading  a  full  account 
of  it  in  the  columns  of  the  Univers  next  day.  Lamache  at 
once  confessed  himself  the  culprit.  He  had  confided  the 
story  to  an  indiscreet  friend,  who  had  evidently  betrayed  them 
to  the  Univers.  The  two  others  rushed  off  immediately  to 
the  Rue  St.  Jacques — Lamache  was  ashamed  to  go  with 
them — to  make  their  apologies  to  the  Archbishop.  He  was 
more  amused  than  annoyed,  and  consoled  instead  of  rebuking 
them.  "  I  had  not  seen  the  article,"  he  said  good-humoredly, 
"  but  it  is  just  like  those  newspapers !  "  He  pressed  them  to 
his  heart,  and  then,  conducting  them  to  the  door  of  an  adjoin- 
ing salon,  he  said  they  would  find  there  the  preachers  whom 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  7  J 

he  had  charged  to  carry  out  their  wishes,  and  that  they  could 
not  do  better  than  go  in  and  talk  over  the  matter  with 
ces  Messieurs  whilst  he  was  taking  his  breakfast. 

The  young  men  were  terribly  disappointed.  The  seven 
preachers  to  whom  they  were  thus  suddenly  introduced  did 
not  in  the  least  realize  their  plan.  They  obeyed  the  Arch- 
bishop, however,  and  opened  their  programme  with  frankness 
and  simplicity.  The  assembled  ecclesiastics,  amongst  whom 
were  some  of  the  lights  of  the  French  clergy,  were  astounded 
by  the  boldness  and  novelty  of  the  design ;  but  the  young 
men  held  their  ground,  and  presently  the  discussion  became 
warm  and  excited  on  both  sides;  three  of  the  preachers  alone 
took  a  direct  part  in  it,  the  others  listening  and  chiming  in  with 
notes  of  approval  or  disapprobation.  Ozanam,  who  had  not 
sat  down,  was  arguing  the  point  with  an  elderly  vicar,  who 
was  especially  scandalized  at  the  "  novelty  "  of  the  scheme, 
and  held  forth  in  a  loud  voice,  backing  as  he  spoke,  and  ges- 
ticulating with  great  vehemence,  while  Ozanam,  advancing  as 
the  other  backed,  displayed  a  corresponding  warmth  of  manner. 
The  discussion  was  at  its  height,  when  suddenly  the  door 
opened,  and  the  majestic  figure  of  the  Archbishop  appeared 
upon  the  threshold.  Ozanam,  who  had  his  back  to  the  door, 
was  made  aware  of  his  presence  by  his  interlocutor  suddenly 
thrusting  out  his  arms  as  if  to  keep  somebody  off,  while  he 
cried  out  entreatingly,  "  Monseigneur,  nous  nous  entendons 
parfaitement  avec  ces  Messieurs!  " 

"  Ah !  "  replied  the  Archbishop,  surveying  the  scene  with  a 
smile ;  "  si  vous  ne  vous  entendez  pas,  au  moins  on  vous  en- 
tend  ! "     And  he  laughingly  withdrew. 

The  opinion  of  the  ecclesiastics  prevailed.  A  series  of  ser- 
mons was  preached  at  Notre  Dame  on  the  i6th  of  February. 
In  spite  of  the  undeniable  talent  and  zeal  of  the  seven 
preachers,  the  result  entirely  justified  Ozanam's  predictions. 
The  want  of  unity  in  the  design,  inevitable  from  the  variety 
of  the  preachers,  marred  the  effect  of  the  whole,  and  the  fact 
of  their  being  all  priests  of  the  old  school  prevented  curiosity, 


7  8  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.     ' 

and  failed  to  attract  any  portion  of  the  public  they  were 
specially  intended  to  reach. 

This  very  public,  meantime,  was  crowding  into  the  small 
chapel  of  the  College  Stanislas,  where  the  Abbe  Lacordaire 
was  pouring  out  his  improvised  addresses  every  Sunday.  The 
€rst  of  these  took  place  on  the  19th  of  January,  1834. 

There  were  one  hundred  free  seats  in  the  chapel,  and  on 
this  first  day  many  were  unoccupied,  but  on  the  following 
Sunday  every  one  was  taken  long  before  the  conference  be- 
gan, and  the  Sunday  after  that  again  the  affluence  was  so 
great  that  the  pupils  were  sent  away  to  make  room  for  the 
strangers,  who  before  long  numbered  six  hundred.  Amongst 
them  were  some  of  the  most  illustrious  names  in  France, 
Chateaubriand,  Lamartine,  Victor  Hugo,  Sainte-Beuve,  etc. ; 
Christians  and  sceptics,  royalists  and  republicans,  all  came 
indiscriminately,  drawn  by  the  power  of  genius.  Berryer, 
who  had  been  in  attendance  from  the  beginning,  arrived  late 
one  day  and  found  the  doors  closed ;  he  sent  in  haste  for  a 
ladder  and  got  in  through  a  window;  the  same  thing  hap- 
pened to  Chateaubriand.  There  could  be  no  doubt  but  that 
the  Abbe  Lacordaire  had  found  out  the  secret  of  his  audience. 
The  "  old  formula  was  swallowed  up,"  the  antique  mould  was 
broken;  instead  of  a  sermon  written  out  beforehand,  begin- 
ning with  a  text,  divided  into  heads,  and  abundantly  fortified 
with  Latin  quotations  from  the  old  Fathers,  the  speaker  stood 
up  and  spoke  from  the  fulness  of  an  overflowing  heart;  it 
was  a  spontaneous  utterance,  ardent,  impassioned,  a  young 
mountain-torrent  bearing  down  all  before  it  in  its  magnificent 
and  sparkling  impetuosity.  His  whole  being  preached;  his 
eye,  like  a  flame,  kindled  where  it  fell;  his  voice  was  not 
modulated  to  the  grave  and  measured  tones  of  the  con- 
ventional type,  but  rang  out  natural  and  unrestrained,  now 
piercing,  now  persuasive,  now  supplicating,  now  menacing. 
P^re  Lacordaire  has  been  called  a  revolutionary;  even  to  this 
day  there  are  to  be  found  some  who  apply  the  term  to  him  as 
a  stigma  and  a  reproach.    In  one  sense  the  accusation  is  per- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  OzdJiam.  7^ 

fectlyjust:  he  made  a  revolution  in  the  pulpit.  But  it  was 
entirely  in  the  outward  form  that  he  revolutionized  it.  The 
subjects  were  the  same  immemorial  ones  that  have  been 
preached  from  all  the  pulpits  of  Christendom  since  St.  Peter 
and  Paul  to  our  own  day — God,  Creation,  the  origin  of  evil, 
original  sin,  the  redemption,  human  nature,  the  prophecies, 
the  Incarnation ;  there  was  no  novelty  in  all  this,  nor  in  his 
interpretation  of  the  doctrines  embodied  in  each  subject; 
nothing  was  new  except  the  j]iod& of  treatment,  rendered  irre- 
sistible by  the  genius  of  the  orator.  The  stereotyped  preacher 
had  become  a  personal  presence,  a  soul  identified  with  the 
souls  he  was  addressing,  sharing  their  fears,  understanding 
their  doubts,  sympathizing  with  their  hopes,  an  apostle  long- 
ing to  convince  them,  to  win  them  to  God  by  the  contagion 
of  his  own  faith,  filled  with  too  mighty  a  compassion  to  leave 
any  room  for  scorn.  M.  de  Montalembert,  speaking  of 
Henri  Lacordaire  as  he  saw  him  shortly  before  this  period  of 
his  life,  describes  him  as  the  impersonation  of  "  virtue  armed 
for  the  defence  of  truth."  And  the  master  touch  paints  him 
well.  Like  David  in  the  flower  of  his  shepherd  days,  when 
he  came  down  and  slew  Goliath,  Lacordaire  stood  forth  in  the 
bright  meridian  of  his  youth,  girt  with  a  warrior's  courage, 
and  strong  with  the  strength  of  his  consecrated  virgin  heart, 
ready  to  give  battle  to  the  enemies  of  his  God. 

The  effect  was  like  nothing  the  world  had  seen  since  the 
days  of  Bossuet.  Ozanam,  who  was  always  one  of  the  earliest 
in  the  chapel  with  his  body-guard  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul, 
listened  entranced  and  inconsolable.  Why  was  this  glorious 
apostolic  voice  confined  within  narrowing  college  walls,  in- 
stead of  waking  the  echoes  of  the  grand  Cathedral !  He  re- 
solved that  nothing  should  deter  him  from  pursuing  the  pro- 
ject which,  now  more  than  ever,  he  felt  to  be  well  inspired. 
While  waiting  and  working  for  its  fulfilment  let  us  see  how  it 
fared  with  the  yoang  student  in  his  own  life  and  personal  con- 
cerns. For  this  purpose  we  cannot  do  better  than  refer  to 
some  of  his  letters. 


CHAPTER  IX, 
1834-5- 

TO   FALCONNET. 

January  7,  1834. 

"  I  AM  undergoing,  at  this  moment,  one  of  the  most  painful  trials  perhaps 
that  life  has  in  store  for  us — uncertainty  as  to  my  vocation.  All  this  is  be- 
tween ourselves  ;  but  such  is  the  flexibility  and  weakness  of  my  character  that 
there  is  no  study,  no  work  which  does  not  possess  a  certain  charm  for  me,  and 
in  which  I  cannot  fairly  succeed,  while  there  is  not  a  single  one  capable  of 
absorbing  all  my  faculties  and  concentrating  my  powers.  I  cannot  occupy 
myself  with  any  one  thing  without  thinking  of  a  score  of  others,  and  yet,  you 
know,  no  work  can  be  great  unless  it  be  otie.  I  used  to  fancy,  in  my  ignorance, 
that  it  was  possible  to  be  at  one  and  the  same  time  a  savant  and  a  barrister  ; 
but,  now  that  my  legal  studies  are  drawing  to  a  close,  I  must  choose  between 
the  two  ;  I  must  put  my  hand  in  the  urn,  and  shall  I  draw  a  black  number  or 
a  white  one  ?  I  am  surrounded,  in  a  certain  way,  by  seductions  of  every  sort ; 
I  am  sought  after,  put  forv.ard,  pushed,  as  it  were,  into  a  career  foreign  to 
my  studies  ;  because  it  so  happens  that  God  and  education  have  endowed  me 
with  a  certain  grasp  of  ideas,  and  a  certain  breadth  of  observation,  people 
want  to  set  me  up  as  a  sort  of  leader  of  the  Young  Catholic  party.  A  number 
of  young  men,  of  great  merit,  favor  me  with  a  degree  of  esteem  of  which  I 
feel  most  unworthy,  and  men  of  mature  age  make  advances  to  me.  I  must 
take  the  lead  in  every  movement ;  and  when  there  is  anything  difficult  to  be 
done,  I  must  bear  the  burden  of  It.  They  cannot  hold  a  meeting,  a  conference 
of  law  or  literature,  but  I  must  take  the  chair  ;  five  or  six  reviews  and  news- 
papers want  articles  from  me  ;  in  one  word,  a  number  of  circumstances,  inde- 
pendent of  my  will,  besiege  and  pursue  me,  and  drag  me  from  the  path  I  had 
tracea  out  for  myself. 

"  I  am  not  prompted  by  vanity  in  telling  you  all  this  ;  on  the  contrary,  I 
feel  so  keenly  my  own  insufficiency — I,  who  am  not  yet  twenty-one — that  all 
these  compliments  and  eulogies  humiliate  me,  and  make  me  often  inclined  to 
laugh  at  my  own  importanre.  But  it  is  in  truth  no  laughing  matter.  I  sometimes 
endure  downright  torture  from  the  fear  that  all  this  incense  may  goto  my  head 
and  intoxicate  me,  and  thus  cause  me  to  miss  what  I  have  hitherto  considered 
as  my  proper  career,  tlie  one  which  the  wishes  of  my  parents  pointed  out,  and 
towards  which  I  myself  felt  willingly  drawn.  And  yet  this  convergence  of 
outward  circumstances,  may  it  not  be  an  indication  of  God's  will  ?  I  cannot 
tell ;  and  in  my  perplexity  I  do  rot  rush  forward,  nor  make  a  single  step  in 
advance,  but  stand  quietly  and  resist,  and  then,  when  the  pressure  is  too 

So 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  8i 

great,  I  give  way.  For  some  time  past — above  all,  since  I  have  seen  some 
very  young  men  laid  low  by  death — life  has  worn  a  different  aspect  to  me. 
Although  I  never  gave  up  the  practice  of  my  religion,  the  idea  of  the  other 
world  had  not  sunk  deeply  enough  into  my  heart,  and  I  only  began  now  to 
realize  that  I  had  not  hitherto  been  mindful  enough  of  two  companions  who 
are  always  walking  by  our  side,  even  when  we  do  not  notice  them — GoJ  and 
death.  I  began  to  feel  that  Christianity  had  been  to  me  hitherto  a  sphere  of 
thought,  a  sphere  of  worship,  more  than  a  sphere  of  action,  of  intention,  of 
morality.  Silvio  Pellico's  writings  esp>ecially  brought  this  home  to  me  ;  and 
the  more  I  dwell  on  it,  the  more  I  feel  myself  grow  in  disinterestedness,  in 
kindness,  and  in  peace.  I  seem  to  understand  better  the  conditions  of  life, 
and  to  have  more  courage  to  go  forth  and  meet  them.  It  seems  to  me  also 
that  I  am  less  proud  than  I  used  to  be.  Don't  fancy,  for  all  this,  that  I  have 
turned  saint  or  hermit.  I  am  unluckily  a  long  way  off  from  the  former,  and 
I  have  no  vocation  for  the  latter.  While  feeling  all  that  I  have  described,  I 
contrive  to  be  very  jolly,  asking  nothing  better  than  to  enjoy  myself,  busying 
myself,  perhaps  rather  too  much,  with  literature,  history,  and  philosophy, 
doing  a  little  law,  and,  as  usual,  losing  a  good  deal  of  time." 

He  said  truly ;  the  "  jolly  "  element  was  not  excluded  from 
this  thoughtful  life,  but  its  manifestations  were  of  the  most 
innocent  kind.  Some  of  the  survivors  of  those  bright  days 
still  recall,  with  a  thrill  of  the  old  merriment,  a  certain 
memorable  soiree  given  by  Ozanam,  to  which  the  guests 
were  invited  to  bring  their  own  chairs,  his  apartment  only 
boasting  of  three.  A  procession  of  young  gentlemen  was, 
accordingly,  seen  one  evening  filing  down  the  Rue  des  Gres, 
each  carrying  a  chair  on  his  head,  to  the  infinite  amusement 
of  the  public,  who  trooped  after  them,  while  the  laughter  of 
the  chair-bearers  themselves  endangered  their  own  and  their 
chairs*  equilibrium,  and  brought  out  the  concierge  in  amaze- 
ment to  enquire  the  meaning  of  the  singular  cortege.  About 
eleven  o'clock  they  came  down  again,  holding  their  chairs 
aloft  as  before,  and  quite  as  steadily,  for  the  hospitality  of 
their  host  had  been  as  simple  as  it  was  cordial,  syrups  and 
little  cakes  being  the  only  excesses  indulged  in.  "  But  oh  ! 
how  we  did  enjoy  ourselves,"  exclaimed  the  narrator  from 
whom  we  hold  the  story ;  "  we  nearly  died  of  laughter,  and 
between  times  there  was  such  earnest,  enthusiastic  talk  on  so 
many  deep  subjects,     I  don't  believe  young  men  know  how 


82  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

to  amuse  themselves  or  laugh  nowadays,  as  we  used  to  do; 
they  want  so  much  money  for  everything;  we  used  to  be 
jolly  on  nothing  at  all !" 

TO    HIS    MOTHER. 

"  i6th  May,  1834. 
"According  as  one  g;rows  older,  and  sees  the  world  nearer,  one  finds  how 
hostile  it  is  to  all  one's  ideas  and  most  cherished  sentiments.  The  more  one 
sees  of  men,  the  more  one  discovers  their  immorality  and  selfishness — pride  in 
the  learned,  foppery  in  men  of  the  world,  coarse  debauchery  amongst  the 
people.  When  one  has  been  brought  up  in  the  pure  atmosphere  of  a  Chris- 
tian family,  the  sight  of  all  this  turns  one  aside  with  disgust  and  indignation, 
and  inclines  one  to  murmur  and  curse.  But  the  Gospel  forbids  it,  and  tells  us 
to  devote  ourselves,  heart  and  soul,  to  this  same  society  which  repulses  and 
despises  us.  One  feels  all  this  deeply  at  my  age,  and  those  realities  which 
destroy  one's  illusions  leave  me  often  sombre  and  grave  as  a  man  of  forty.  I 
feel  that  my  duty  is  to  fill  some  place,  but  I  cannot  see  where  it  is  ;  ambitions 
are  so  numerous,  and  capacities  so  multiplied  and  various,  that  it  is  difficult 
to  break  through  the  lines.  How  can  a  poor  little  ear  of  wheat  pierce  its  way 
up  through  the  masses  of  tares  growing  all  around  it  ?  And  then,  even  if  I 
saw  my  place  clearly  marked  out,  I  want  the  necessary  energy  to  fill  it ;  you 
know  this  is  the  constant  burden  of  my  complaint — irresolution  and  frailty.  I 
never  can  say  to-day,  '  I  will  do  this,*  and  then  to-morrow  do  it.  But  per- 
haps, after  all,  I  am  too  young,  and  it  is  wrong  of  me  to  worry  myself  so,  and 
to  want  to  be  a  grown  man  when  I  am  still  so  near  childhood  in  many  points  ; 
but  I  cannot  forget  that  this  year  my  education  will  be  finished,  and  that  in 
the  month  of  August  I  may  be  a  barrister  if  I  wish — I,  a  barrister  1  After 
all,  it  is  no  great  things,  a  barrister." 

Frederic  had  no  taste  for  politics,  and  troubled  himself 
little  about  them,  although  he  was  destined  later  to  exercise 
a  certain  indirect  political  influence  in  his  sphere.  The  fol- 
lowing letter,  written  at  this  period,  will  be  read  with  interest. 
The  opinions  it  expresses  were,  as  we  shall  see,  those  to 
which  he  adhered  throughout  his  life  : 

"  As  to  political  opinions,  I  should  like  to  see  the  annihilation  of  the  spirit 
of  politics  for  the  benefit  of  the  social  spirit.  I  have  for  the  old  royalty  all  the 
respect  which  one  owes  to  a  glorious  invalid,  but  I  would  not  lean  on  him, 
because  with  his  wooden  leg  he  could  not  keep  pace  with  the  new  generation. 
I  neither  deny  nor  repudiate  any  combination  of  government ;  I  regard  them 
all  merely  as  instruments  for  making  mankind  happier  and  better.  If  you 
must  have  a  formula,  here  it  is  : 

"  I  believe  in  authority  as  a  means,  in  liberty  as  a  means,  in  charity  as  an 
end. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  S3 

"  There  are  two  principal  kinds  of  government,  and  these  two  kinds  may 
be  animated  by  opposite  principles. 

"  Either  it  is  the  sacrificing  {exploitation)  of  all  to  the  profit  of  one,  as  in 
the  monarchy  of  Nero — a  monarchy  which  I  abhor. 

♦*  Or  it  is  the  sacrifice  of  one  to  the  profit  of  all,  as  in  the  monarchy  of  St. 
Louis,  which  I  revere  and  love. 

♦♦  Or  it  is  the  sacrificing  of  all  for  the  profit  of  each  one,  as  in  the  republic 
of  the  Terror,  and  this  repubUc  I  curse. 

"  Or  it  is  the  self-sacrifice  of  each  one  for  the  benefit  of  all ;  and  this  is  the 
Christian  republic  of  the  primitive  Church  of  Jerusalem.  Perhaps  it  may  be 
also  that  of  the  end  of  time,  the  highest  state  to  which  humanity  can  rise. 

"  Every  government  is  respectable  in  my  eyes,  insomuch  as  it  represents 
the  Divine  principle  of  authority.  In  this  sense  I  understand  the  omnis 
potestas  of  St.  Paul.  But  I  think  that  in  every  government  the  sacred  prin- 
ciple of  liberty  should  be  admitted,  and  I  believe  that  we  may  energetically 
defend  this  principle,  and  that  we  may  raise  our  voice  in  stem  and  courageous 
accents  to  warn  the  authority  which  sacrifices  it  instead  of  sacrificing  itself. 
Speech  is  meant  to  be  the  dam  which  should  be  opposed  to  power ;  it  is  the 
grain  of  sand  against  which  the  waves  break. 

♦'Opposition  is  useful  and  admissible,  but  not  insurrection;  active  obe- 
dience, passive  resistance ;  the  Prigione  of  Silvio  Pellico,  not  les  Paroles  <fun 
croyant. 

"  You  and  I  are  too  young  just  now  to  take  any  part  in  the  social  struggle, 
but  this  does  not  compel  us  meantime  to  remain  idle  in  the  midst  of  the 
world  suffering  and  groaning  around  us.  A  prep)aratory  way  is  open  to  us 
before  trying  to  aid  in  the  public  good  ;  we  may  do  good  to  a  few  before 
regenerating  France  ;  we  may  succor  a  few  of  her  poor  sons.  This  is  why  I 
long  to  see  all  yomtg  men  ttlio  have  intelligence  and  heart  united  in  some 
scheme  o/c/uzrity,  that  thus  a  vast  and  generous  association  for  the  relief  of 
the  poorer  classes  might  be  formed  all  over  the  country." 

The  holidays  of  1834  were  spent  at  Lyons  in  the  quiet 
circle  of  his  family.  Frederic's  impression  of  the  changes 
which  had  taken  place  during  his  absence  of  two  years  is 
thus  described  to  Lallier : 

*'  I  feel  almost  a  stranger  here  after  two  years'  absence.  Old  acquaintances 
are  gone  ;  little  cousins  have  made  their  appearance  during  my  exile  ;  older 
ones  have  gone  through  their  philosophy,  and  are  getting  ready  to  goto  Paris. 
Some  have  got  married,  others  have  lost  their  wives.  My  old  confessor  is 
dead,  and  nearly  all  the  priests  in  the  parish  have  been  changed.  The  town 
itself  is  changed.  The  cannon  of  the  '  joum^es  *  of  April  have  destrcyed  some 
of  the  houses,  but,  by  way  of  compensation,  our  hills  are  crowned  with  brand- 
new  fortresses,  with  green  glacis  and  white  walls,  and  cannons  of  the  finest 
bronze.  Trade  is  nowhere,  and  the  workmen  are  emigrating  to  Switzerland  ; 
but  then  we  have  a  splendid  garrison,  reviews,  practising  of  f  re-arms,  patrols, 


84  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

and  sentries  at  every  step.  The  quays  are  carpeted  with  uniforms,  and  long 
sabres  ring  pleasantly  on  the  pavement  and  in  the  public  squares.  If  a  few 
manufactories  are  empty,  what  then  ?  Prisons,  and  those  haunts  which  sup- 
ply them  with  inmates,  are  full  to  overflowing.  In  many  places  the  cannons 
and  bullets  have  damaged  entire  neighborhoods,  so  that  the  fronts  of  the 
shops  have  to  be  completely  rebuilt.  In  fact  I  can  hardly  recognize  this  poor 
old  city  of  Lyons.  On  the  other  hand,  I  have  found  some  new  joys  awaiting 
me  here.  Our  family  from  Florence  has  come  to  live  here  ;  my  uncle  and 
aunt  and  cousins  are  most  affectionate  and  kind  to  me ;  add  to  this  the  love 
of  my  parents  and  my  two  brothers,  and  you  will  say  I  ought  to  be  satis- 
fied ;  that  this  is  enough.  Well  now,  my  dear  L.,  I  think  I  may  say  it,  without 
ingratitude  to  Providence,  it  is  not  enough.  God  has  placed  in  our  souls  two 
cravings  which  resemble  each  other,  but  which  we  must  not  confound.  We 
want  kindred  to  cherish  us,  but  we  also  want  friends  who  are  attached  to  us. 
The  tenderness  that  springs  from  blood,  and  the  affection  that  springs  from 
sympathy,  are  two  distinct  enjoyments  which  we  cannot  do  without,  and 
neither  of  which  can  replace  the  other.  The  love  of  kindred  is  the  more 
sacred  of  the  two,  because  it  is  planted  in  the  heart  by  God  Himself ;  friend- 
ship, on  the  other  hand,  is  the  more  seductive,  from  being  our  own  achieve- 
ment." 

TO    LALLIER. 

"  Of  all  my  recent  pleasures  the  greatest  has  been  a  pilgrimage  to  St.  Point 
to  see  M.  de  Lamartine.  Dufieux,  who  knows  him,  had  asked  permission  to 
bring  me.  We  set  out  together  one  Sunday  morning  for  Macon,  where  we 
arrived  towards  evening,  after  passing  through  a  charming  country.  There 
we  heard  that  M.  de  Lamartine  was  at  his  Chateau  de  St.  Point,  five  leagues 
beyond  Macon,  in  the  mountains.  Accordingly  on  Monday  morning  after 
breakfast  we  started  in  a  light  char-a-banc,  driven  by  a  small  charioteer  in 
rags,  who  took  us  over  the  road  of  the  ancient  and  celebrated  Abbey  of  Cluny. 
When  we  had  admired  from  a  distance  the  ruins  of  this  old  house  of  God,  we 
struck  off  to  the  left  through  the  wide  and  beautiful  valley  where  the  great 
man's  abode  is  situated.  On  a  knoll  at  the  foot  of  the  mountains  there  is  a 
little  village,  overshadowed  by  a  semi-Gothic  church  and  a  castle  ;  the  castle 
belonged  formerly  to  the  dreaded  Count  of  St.  Point,  who  rivalled  in  cruelty 
the  Baron  des  Adrets.  The  hamlet  consisted,  twenty  years  ago,  of  a  group  of 
coarse,  ignorant,  and  wicked  peasants,  M.  de  Lamartine  has  civilized  the 
entire  place.  He  repaired,  enlarged,  and  embellished  the  castle  ;  he  rebuilt 
the  steeple  ;  he  has  bought  a  house  to  serve  for  a  hospital  and  schools ;  he  has 
opened  roads  to  establish  communications  between  the  village  and  the  high- 
road, and  he  is  at  this  moment  building  a  magnificent  bridge  over  a  ravine. 
These  improvements  have  drawn  numerous  inhabitants  to  the  valley.  White 
houses  are  rising  on  every  side,  and  the  whole  region  wears  an  aspect  of  ease 
and  content.  The  manners  of  the  people  have  become  pure  and  gentle,  and 
the  stranger  who  comes  to  visit  the  poet  meets  good  folks  at  every  turn  who 
volunteer  to  serve  him  as  guides.  And  now  here  we  are  at  the  gates  of  the 
castle!    An  elegant  Gothic  porch  adprns  the  eotrance,  while  three  lordly 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  85 

towers  lend  it  a  somewhat  majestic  appearance.  We  cross  the  threshold  of 
the  salon^  where  Madame  de  Lamartine  greets  us  with  the  utmost  kindness  ; 
she  is  an  excellent  lady,  good  and  pious,  an  Englishwoman  converted  to  the 
Catholic  faith.  It  so  happened  that  this  day  there  were  a  great  many  people 
at  St.  Point,  an  English  family  amongst  others,  so  we  saw  to  our  disappoint- 
ment that  we  should  not  be  able  to  enjoy  the  undivided  society  of  him  whom 
we  had  come  so  far  to  see.  At  last  M.  de  Lamartine  himself  appeared.  No- 
thing could  be  more  friendly  than  the  way  he  welcomed  Dufieux,  and  he  re- 
ceived me  with  the  greatest  affability.  He  took  us  off  to  a  pavibon,  where  we 
sat  chatting,  all  three,  for  nearly  two  hours.  He  explained  to  us  his  large 
and  generous  political  views,  and  his  beautiful  literary  theories.  He  asked 
innumerable  questions  concerning  the  young  men  of  the  colleges  of  to-day, 
and  the  spirit  which  animates  them,  and  seemed  full  of  hope  in  the  future. 
His  ideas  are  linked  together  with  solid  logic,  his  language  is  picturesque  and 
brilliant ;  he  thinks  more  like  a  philosopher  than  a  poet,  and  speaks  more  like 
a  poet  than  philosopher.  I  have  rarely  seen  a  man  who  combines  more 
noble  qualities.  He  is  fifty-three  years  of  age,  and  bears  on  his  countenance 
the  impress  of  sorrow  borne  with  dignity,  and  of  glory  accepted  with  modesty. 
His  forehead  is  very  broad,  his  eyes  large  and  bright,  the  lines  of  his  mouth 
at  once  gracious  and  severe,  his  features  are  thin,  his  height  commanding. 

*'  At  table  and  in  the  salon  he  struck  me  as  full  of  charm  ;  he  pressed  us 
cordially  to  remain  and  spend  a  week  with  him,  and,  as  we  could  not  do  this, 
he  made  us  promise  to  go  and  see  him  in  Paris  this  winter.  We  dined,  slept, 
and  next  day  he  took  us  to  see  his  two  other  houses  of  Milly  and  Monceaux. 
All  along  the  road  the  peasants  saluted  him  with  an  air  of  affection ;  he 
accosted  them  and  chatted  with  them,  enquiring  about  their  vintage,  their 
affairs,  and  their  families ;  they  all  seemed  to  love  him,  and  the  children  ran 
after  him,  calling  out  Bon  jour ^  Monsieur  Alphonsel  At  Monceaux  I  found 
M.  de  Pierreclare.  We  dined  together,  and  in  the  evening  took  leave  of  our 
illustrious  host  and  relapsed  into  our  native  obscurity." 

These  pleasant  episodes  did  not  distract  Ozanam's  mind 
unduly  from  graver  interests.  Amidst  the  pleasures  of  his 
holiday  he  was  mindful  of  the  poor  and  their  friends  of  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul. 

TO   M.    X. 

*♦  I  think  you  have  taken  what  was  best  worth  taking  amongst  us  in  seizing 
a  charitable  idea,  which  was  latent  in  your  own  heart,  no  doubt,  but  had  not 
yet  found  its  outward  expression.  In  a  work  like  this,  I  think  we  should 
abandon  ourselves  much  more  to  the  inspiration  of  our  heart  than  the  calcu- 
lations of  our  head.  Providence  sends  us  counsel  and  advice  in  the  form  of 
external  circumstances,  of  thoughts  and  inspirations.  I  think  you  will  do  bet- 
ter to  follow  this  guidance  freely,  and  not  hamper  yourself  with  rules  and  for- 
mulas. Besides,  the  end  which  we  propose  to  ourselves  in  Paris  is  not  pre- 
Ctselj  the  same,  it  seems  to  me,  which  you  have  in  the  provinces.    We  aw 


S6  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozananu 

birds  of  passage,  at  a  distance  from  the  paternal  nest,  and  over  whom  that 
vulture,  incredulity,  hovers,  hoping  to  make  a  prey  of  us.  The  first  thing 
was,  therefore,  to  gather  these  poor  birds  of  passage  under  some  sort  of  pro- 
tecting shelter,  and  to  form  an  association  of  tmttual  encouragement  for  Catho- 
lic young  men,  a  centre  where  they  would  find  friendship,  support,  and  the 
stimulus  of  example  ;  where  the  elders  would  welcome  the  new-comers  from 
the  provinces,  and  give  them  a  sort  of  moral  hospitality.  Now,  the  strongest 
tie,  the  principle  of  true  friendship,  is  charity.  Charity  cannot  exist  in  the 
hearts  of  many  without  outwardly  overflowing ;  it  is  a  fire  that  dies  for  want 
of  being  fed,  and  the  food  of  charity  is  good  works.  Since  we  have  been  in 
existence  we  have  distributed  about  two  thousand  four  hundred  francs,  some 
books,  and  a  pretty  good  quantity  of  old  clothes.  Our  resources  consist  in 
the  collection  we  make  every  Tuesday,  the  alms  of  some  charitable  persons 
who  come  to  the  rescue  of  our  good  will,  and  our  cast-off  clothes.  As  it  is 
possible  that  at  the  beginning  of  the  new  scholastic  year  our  numbers  will  be 
increased  to  a  hundred,  we  shall  bs  obliged  to  divide,  and  split  into  several  sec- 
tions, which  will  all  periodically  hold  a  common  meeting.  When  those  new 
arrangements  have  been  made,  I  will  let  ycu  know.  For,  notwithstanding 
what  I  have  just  been  saying  of  the  difference  which  exists  between  our  special 
aims,  this  should  not  diminish  their  union  and  harmony  ;  on  the  contrary, 
just  as  divergent  rays  tend  to  the  same  centre,  so  should  our  various  efforts, 
tending  to  different  points,  resolve  themselves  into  the  same  motive  and  pro- 
ceed from  the  same  principle.  We  must  therefore  be  united  so  as  to  double 
our  strength;  we  must  hold  frequent  communication  with  each  other,  so  that 
we  may  all  be  stimulated  and  made  proud  and  happy  in  common  by  the  suc- 
cesses of  each  individually.  In  writing  to  our  little  society  in  Paris  I  begged 
leave  to  draw  up  a  list  of  correspondents  with  your  name  at  the  head,  and 
then  those  of  your  friends.  This  will  not  be  an  empty  academical  form,  but 
a  real  correspondence,  for  which  you  may  count  on  my  punctuality  as  I  count 
upon  your  friendship." 

On  his  return  to  Paris  after  the  holidays  he  writes  to  the 
same  friend  : 

'*I  did  not  forget  the^  report  that  you  asked  me  for.  Our  President,  M. 
Bailly,  looked  for  it  amongst  his  papers,  but  has  failed  to  find  it ;  the  docu- 
ment must  therefore  be  lost.  It  is  no  great  misfortune  ;  there  was  perhaps  a 
germ  of  pride  in  this  written  resume  of  our  work,  and  God,  who  forbids  our 
left  hand  to  know  what  our  right  hand  does,  may  have  allowed  us  to  lose  a 
title-deed  whose  only  use  was  to  gratify  a  foolish  vanity.  Charity  should 
never  look  back,  but  always  forward,  for  the  number  of  her  past  benefits  is 
always  very  small,  while  the  present  and  future  wants  that  she  has  to  relieve 
are  infinite.  Look  at  the  philanthropical  societies,  with  their  meetings,  re- 
ports, summings-up,  bills,  and  accounts  ;  before  they  are  a  year  old  they  have 
volumes  of  minutes  and  so  forth.  Philanthropy  is  a  vain  woman  who  likes  to 
deck  herself  out  in  her  good  works  and  admire  herself  in  the  glass  ;  whereas 
charity  is  a  mother  whose  eyes  rest  lovingly  on  the  child  at  her  breast,  who 


Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanatn,  87 

has  no  thought  of  self,  but  forgets  her  beauty  in  her  love.  Neither  do  I  con- 
sider this  loss  of  much  consequence  to  you.  It  is  better  that  you  should  raise 
your  work  by  your  own  strength,  under  the  inspiration  of  your  own  heart, 
according  to  local  circumstances,  and  under  the  guidance  of  the  venerable 
priest  who  presides  over  you  ;  with  all  this  you  will  easily  do  without  a  model 
which  was  at  best  very  imperfect ;  you  will  not  do  as  we  did,  but  better  than 
we  did. 

"This  prediction  is  no  flattery  ;  it  is  simply  the  expression  of  the  feeling 
inspired  by  your  letter,  of  that  apostolic  fire  which  has  inflamed  the  Christian 
world,  and  of  which  your  soul  has  caught  the  sacred  spark.  It  would  have 
been  selfish  to  keep  such  a  pleasure  all  to  myself ;  I  felt  I  must  communicate 
your  glowing  words  to  our  little  gathering,  so  I  took  your  letter  with  me,  and 
read  the  greater  part  of  it  to  our  colleagues  and  the  cure  of  the  parish,  who 
had  kindly  come  to  take  the  chair  that  day.  The  impression  it  produced  will 
be  best  conveyed  to  you  in  the  words  of  one  of  the  members,  who  exclaimed, 
♦  Truly  this  is  the  faith  and  the  charity  of  the  first  centuries  ! '  Oh  !  the  faith 
and  charity  of  the  first  centuries  1  It  is  not  too  much  for  ours.  Are  we  not, 
like  the  Christians  of  those  early  times,  thrown  into  the  midst  of  a  corrupt 
civilization  and  a  society  that  is  falling  to  pieces  ?  Cast  your  eyes  on  the 
world  around  you.  The  rich  and  the  happy  ones,  are  they  much  better  than 
those  who  made  answer  to  St.  Paul,  *  We  will  hear  you  another  time '  ?  And 
the  poor  and  the  people,  are  they  much  more  enlightened  and  better  off 
than  those  to  whom  the  apostles  first  preached  the  Gospel  ?  Equal  evils, 
therefore,  demand  an  equal  remedy ;  the  world  has  grown  cold,  and  it  is  fqr 
us  Christians  to  rekindle  the  vital  fire ;  for  us  also  to  reopen  the  era  of  mar- 
tyrdom. For  to  be  a  martyr  is  possible  to  each  of  us ;  to  be  a  martyr  is  to 
give  ourselves  up  to  God  and  our  brethren,  to  give  to  Heaven  all  that  we  have 
received — our  goods,  our  blood,  our  whole  being.  This  offering  is  in  the 
hands  of  each  of  us ;  we  can  all  make  this  sacrifice.  It  only  remains  to  choose 
the  altar  whereon  we  will  lay  it,  the  divinity  at  whose  shrine  we  will  conse- 
crate our  youth  and  the  days  that  are  to  follow ;  let  us  decide  whether  our 
rendezvous  shall  be  in  the  temple  of  the  idol  of  egotism,  or  in  the  sanctuary 
of  God  and  of  humanity.  Humanity  in  our  times  is  very  much  like  the  tra- 
veller in  the  Gospel :  while  journeying  along  the  road  traced  out  for  it  by 
Christ,  it  was  seized  upon  by  robbers,  by  wicked  men,  who  despoiled  it  of  all 
it  possessed,  the  treasure  of  faith  and  love,  and  then  left  it  naked  and  moan- 
ing, lying  by  the  wayside.  The  priests  and  the  Levites  passed,  and  this  time, 
as  they  were  true  priests  and  Levites,  they  drew  nigh  to  the  sufferer  whom 
they  fain  would  have  healed,  but  in  his  delirium  he  did  not  recognize  them, 
and  thrust  them  from  him. 

"  Let  us,  in  our  turn,  poor  Samaritans  that  we  are,  weak  and  of  little  faith, 
draw  near  to  the  wounded  man.  Perhaps  he  will  not  take  fright  at  us,  being 
only  what  we  are,  but  will  let  us  try  to  probe  his  wounds  and  pour  balm  into 
them  ;  let  us  breathe  words  of  consolation  and  peace  into  his  ear,  and  then, 
■when  his  eyes  are  opened,  we  will  place  him  in  the  hands  of  those  whom  God 
has  constituted  the  guardians  and  physicians  of  souls,  and  who  are,  so  to 
speak,  our  hosts  on  the  road  of  our  pilgrimage  here  below,  since  they  feed  our 


88  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

famished  spirits  with  the  word  of  life  and  the  promise  of  a  better  world.  This 
is  the  task  that  is  before  us,  this  is  the  divine  vocation  to  which  Providence 
calls  us." 

The  resuming  of  Ozanam's  studies  was  the  signal  for  a 
return  of  the  old  scruples  and  anxieties  from  which  we  have 
already  seen  him  suffering.  He  writes  to  one  of  his  college 
friends,  M.  Dufieux : 

"  My  conscience  does  not  spare  me.  I  may  say  it  to  my  own  shame  and  the 
greater  glory  of  God,  nobody  perhaps  has  received  more  than  I  have  :  good 
inspirations,  holy  desires,  noble  ambitions ;  there  is  no  virtue,  there  is  not  a 
good  work,  moral  or  scientific,  to  which  this  mysterious  inner  voice  has  not  at 
some  time  or  other  invited  me  ;  there  is  perhaps  not  a  vine  in  the  Father's 
vineyard  that  has  been  surrounded  with  more  care,  and  to  which  He  may  with 
greater  justice  address  those  words,  '  Quid  potui  facere  vinese  et  non  feci  ? ' 
But  I,  hke  an  ill  weed  as  I  am,  have  not  expanded  under  this  divine  breath, 
nor  struck  my  roots  deep  into  the  soil  that  has  so  lovingly  worked  all  around 
me.  At  this  very  moment,  when  the  call  from  above  is  sounding  in  my  ears, 
when  I  feel  inspiration  withdrawing  from  me  as  it  were  in  wai^ning,  even  at 
this  moment  I  cannot  voill^  I  cannot  do,  and  I  feel  the  weight  of  daily  neglected 
responsibility  gathering  on  my  head. 

"  I  pour  out  to  you  my  feelings  as  they  come,  without  order  or  forethought ; 
but  that  you  may  the  better  believe  me,  and  that  your  indulgent  affection  may 
not  attribute  this  confession  of  weakness  to  a  moment  of  passing  excitement,  I 
will  explain  myself  more  clearly. 

"There  are  two  things  especially  that  fire  us  young  Christians  with  a  gene- 
rous ardor ;  these  are  science  and  virtue.  I  was  taught  early  to  love  both,  and 
I  fancied  myself  made  for  them.  I  had  resolved  on  deeper  studies  and  a  more 
complete  moral  reform  for  those  two  years  that  I  have  to  remain  in  the  capi- 
tal ;  I  placed  my  hopes  under  the  auspices  of  our  celestial  Mother,  and  I 
trusted  much  in  my  own  good  will.  Well,  since  then  three  months  have 
slipped  away,  and  here  I  am  with  my  hands  empty  !  Continual  malaise  and 
wearisome  efforts  began  to  quench  my  ardor,  and  when  I  at  last  found  my- 
self with  full  leisure  and  all  needful  facilities,  I  fell  into  a  state  of  languor 
from  which  I  cannot  rouse  myself.  Study,  that  I  so  loved  formerly,  now  fatigues 
me  ;  my  pen  is  like  lead  in  my  fingers ;  I  can  no  longer  write.  Stretigth^ 
that  g^ft  of  the  Holy  Spirit  so  necessary  to  the  men  of  this  age  if  they  are  to 
traverse  its  perils  without  failing,  strength  is  not  in  me.  I  am  blown  about  by 
every  wind  of  my  imagination.  Piety  is  a  yoke  to  me,  prayer  a  mere  habit  of 
the  lips,  the  practice  of  Christianity  a  duty  which  I  accomplish  with 
cowardice,  the  last  branch  I  cling  to  so  as  not  to  roll  to  the  bottom  of  th- 
abyss,  but  whose  nourishing  fruits  I  do  not  cull.  I  see  young  men  of  my  age 
advancing  proudly  in  the  path  of  real  progress,  while  I  hang  back,  despairing 
of  ever  following  them,  and  spending  in  idle  lamentation  th?  tiipe  I  should  b^ 
up  and  doing." 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  89 

The  month  of  March,  1835,  which  opened  in  such  depres- 
sion for  Ozanam,  had  a  great  consolation  and  triumph  in  store 
for  hira,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  next  chapter. 

In  the  autumn  of  this  year  we  find  the  following  letter 

TO    LALLIER. 

•♦  Lyons,  September  ^i,  1835. 

** .  .  •  You  know  I  left  Paris  on  the  12th,  as  I  was  anxious  to  be  at 
Lyons  for  my  mother's/*?/^  on  the  15th  ;  and  also  to  hear  Mass  on  that  day,  it 
being  the/e/eot  the  Blessed  Virgin.  I  had  therefore  to  halt  at  Macon,  twelve 
miles  from  hence,  to  assist  at  the  Holy  Sacrifice,  hoping  10  find  a  coach  that 
would  take  me  on  later  in  the  day.  But  I  reckoned  without  my  host ;  there 
was  no  conveyance  to  be  had  but  shanks'  mare,  and  so  I  had  to  spend  the 
beautiful  day  of  the  Assumption  tramping  over  the  dusty  road  ;  at  last,  within 
a  few  leagues  of  Lyons,  I  came  up  with  a  shaky  old  trap  that  jogged  me  to 
my  destination  by  eight  in  the  evening,  just  as  they  were  all  assembled  to 
wish  my  mother  joy— father,  mother,  brothers,  uncle,  aunt,  cousin^,  all  were 
there,  and  I  leave  you  to  guess  what  a  joyous  meeting  it  was. 

"But a  certain  sadness  was  mmgled  with  this  first  embrace.  The  fears  I 
had  entertained  about  ray  mother's  health  were  but  too  well  founded.  You 
remember  that  terrible  day,  and  the  sweet  letter  that  I  showed  you  ?  My 
terrors  and  grief  were  shared  in  the  same  degree  by  my  father  and  my 
brothers.  For  two  months  my  mother  was  a  prey  to  a  languid  exhaustion  of 
which  it  was  impossible  to  foretell  the  end.  Some  grave  symptoms  were  added 
to  this  weakness,  and  the  fears  of  those  who  were  near  her  at  Lyons  were  no 
less  acute  than  mine  in  Paris.  Happily,  before  my  return  a  great  improve- 
ment had  taken  place  ;  she  is  no  longer  ill,  but  she  still  bears  the  traces  of  her 
recent  sufferings.  When  I  kissed  her,  I  was  frightened  at  the  thinness  of  her 
cheeks.  I  am  at  rest  for  the  moment,  but  I  cannot  help  trembling  for  the 
future.  I  cannot  but  see  that  this  precious  health  is  seriously  shaken ;  that 
her  sensitiveness  has  become  excessive  ;  that  the  most  trifling  thing  distresses 
and  alarms  her;  that  her  angelic  sweetness  and  goodness  are  constantly 
struggling  against  a  ner\ous  and  diseased  organization.  And  with  all  this 
she  redoubles  her  good  works,  and  imposes  on  herself  an  amount  of  fatigue 
which  I,  young  and  strong  as  I  am,  would  recoil  from.  The  thought  of  next 
winter  fills  me  with  anxiety.  Dear  friend,  if  you  have  two  places  to  spare  for 
me  in  your  prayers,  give  the  first  one  to  my  mother,  and  the  other  to  myself ; 
if  you  have  only  one,  let  it  be  for  my  mother  ;  to  pray  for  her  is  to  pray  for 
me. 

*'  Added  to  these  personal  anxieties  I  found  a  general  impression  of  terror 
prevailing  at  Lyons.  The  cholera,  which  has  been  making  such  fearful 
ravages  in  the  southern  provinces,  seemed  to  be  steadily  advancing  to  our 
gates.  It  had  come  up  the  Rhone,  within  twelve  leagues  of  our  city,  driving 
before  it  crowds  of  fugitives,  who  flew  to  us  with  the  most  frightful  accounts, 
and  brought  with  them  a  degree  of  terror  worse  even  than  the  plague  itself. 


9©  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozana?n, 

Our  impressionable  city  was  terribly  excited.  The  ignorant  and  brutal  part 
of  the  population  began  to  talk  of  poisoned  waters,  and  to  make  ready  for  the 
invasion  of  the  pestilence  by  riots  and  insurrection  ;  while,  on  the  other  hand, 
a  multitude  of  the  faithful  besieged  Notre  Dame  de  Fourvieres,  singing  peni- 
tent canticles  within  the  church  and  in  the  open  air  outside  ;  while  numbers  of 
devoted  persons  presented  themselves  to  serve  as  nurses  for  the  poor  when  the 
epidemic  should  have  actually  come.  Fifteen  hundred  had  their  names  in- 
scribed beforehand. 

"  Well,  God  has  for  the  second  time  glorified  His  Mother  and  consoled  our 
city;  once  more  His  hand,  which  was  raised  to  threaten,  has  been  opened  to 
bless.  The  most  ancient  church  of  old  Gaul,  the  church  of  Lyons,  is  proud, 
happy,  and  grateful  for  the  magnificent  privilege  which  has  been  granted  to 
her.  The  name  of  the  Dame  de  Fourvieres  no  longer  brings  a  smile  to  the 
lips  of  the  sceptic,  who  cannot  but  think  that  to  her  protection  he  owes  per- 
haps his  life." 

Ozanam  alludes  here  to  a  circumstance  which  is  spoken 
of  to  this  day  with  emotions  of  lively  gratitude  by  the 
faithful  of  Lyons,  and  with  respect  by  all.  In  1831  the 
cholera  was  raging  fiercely  in  the  surrounding  towns,  and  had 
reached  within  a  short  distance  of  the  city.  The  panic- 
stricken  population  rushed  in  thousands  up  the  hillside  of 
Fourvieres,  and  placing  themselves  under  the  protection  of 
the  Mother  of  God,  vowed  to  commemorate  their  gratitude 
for  their  deliverance,  if  she  obtained  it,  by  painting  a  me- 
morial-picture in  her  honor,  and  placing  it  in  the  church. 
The  vow  was  heard;  the  pestilence  advanced  to  the  very 
gates  of  Lyons,  and  then  suddenly  halted  ;  not  a  single  case 
occurred  in  the  city.  In  1835  the  same  miraculous  pro- 
tection was  granted  to  a  similar  manifestation  of  faith  in 
Mary's  power  and  clemency ;  nor  has  the  charmed  circle 
which  she  drew  around  the  favored  city  ever  been  broken 
since.  In  recent  visitations  the  cholera  has  gone  all  around 
it,  ravaging  the  immediate  neighborhood,  but  never  entering 
Lyons.  This  fact  is  so  well  known,  that  as  soon  as  a  cry  is 
raised  announcing  the  approach  of  the  dreaded  visitor,  great 
numbers  flock  in  from  the  towns  and  villages,  thus,  humanly 
speaking,  multiplying  the  chances  of  contagion  by  fright  and 
overcrowding. 


CHAPTER  X 

1835-6. 

The  extraordinary  success  of  the  Abb^  Lacordaire*s  Con- 
ferences the  year  before  had  caused  alarm  in  grave  and 
influential  quarters.  The  clergy  looked  on  with  a  certain 
vague  uneasiness  at  first,  and  then  with  absolute  terror,  at  the 
popularity  which  was  drawing  all  the  intellect  of  Paris  to  the 
feet  of  the  young  preacher.  Not  a  word  was  to  be  said 
against  his  orthodoxy,  but  the  form  and  manner  of  its  enuncia- 
tion was  novel,  and  novelty  was  next  to  heresy.  Nothing 
was  held  in  greater  horror  at  archiepiscopal  headquarters  than 
novelty.  Lacordaire,  who,  before  the  end  of  the  Conferences 
at  the  College,  had  been  overpowered  by  invitations  from  the 
various  cures  in  Paris  to  go  and  preach  in  their  churches,  went 
to  consult  the  Archbishop  as  to  which  he  siiould  accept,  and 
was  dismayed  to  find  the  latter  reluctant  to  let  him  continue 
the  ministry  of  preaching  at  all.  The  Abb6  Buquet  counted 
on  his  resuming  his  Conferences  at  Stanislas  in  the  course  of 
the  year,  but  the  Archbishop  appeared  to  hesitate  at  consent- 
ing even  to  this.  He  did  not,  however,  venture  to  say  so  at 
once ;  he  merely  requested  that  Lacordaire  would  refrain  from 
preaching  anywhere  during  Lent;  "Not,"  he  added,  "that 
I  am  jealous  of  talent,  but  it  is  better  not  to  provoke  invidious 
comparisons." 

Lacordaire  submitted  without  a  word,  and  promised  that 
he  would  not  speak  in  public  during  Lent,  but  the  Arch- 
bishop still  hesitated  about  the  Conferences,  and  said  he  must 
have  eight  days  to  think  the  matter  over. 

Meantime  the  enemies  of  the  new  apostle  were  bringing  all 
influence  to  bear  against  him  in  the  mind  of  the  Archbishop. 


92  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

It  was  alleged  that  even  the  Government  had  taken  fright 
and  looked  in  displeasure  at  the  spirit  of  revolution,  nay,  of 
anarchy,  which  pervaded  the  language  of  Lacordaire.  It 
dreaded  the  effect  of  this  exciting  eloquence  on  the  young 
men  of  Paris,  and  it  was  to  be  feared  that,  if  the  Conferences 
were  resumed,  they  would  witness  the  painful  scandal  of  an 
interviention  by  the  authorities.  There  was  not  the  smallest 
foundation  for  any  such  fears  on  the  part  of  the  Government, 
and  this  representation  of  them  was  immensely  exaggerated ; 
but  Monseigneur  de  Quelen,  who  did  not  see  exactly  where 
to  distinguish  between  malice  and  hearsay,  was  exceedingly 
disturbed,  so  that  when  at  the  end  of  a  week  Lacordaire  re- 
turned, he  found  him  more  nervous  and  vacillating  than  be- 
fore. The  fact  of  his  having  no  definite  grounds  for  his  pro- 
hibition made  it  seem  unjust  and  cruel.  Lacordaire  defended 
himself  firmly,  but  with  a  certain  calm  indifference  as  to  the 
issue.  The  Archbishop  admitted  that  none  of  the  theologians 
who  had  assisted  at  the  Conferences  had  detected  a  single 
flaw  in  any  part  of  his  doctrine.  "  Then,  Monseigneur," 
argued  Lacordaire,  "  since  my  orthodoxy  is  above  suspicion, 
what  signifies  the  divided  opinion  of  parties  ?  What  work, 
since  the  foundation  of  Christianity,  was  ever  accomplished 
without  giving  rise  to  divided  opinions  ?  " 

As  to  the  political  complications  upon  which  his  opponents 
laid  stress,  he  denied  their  existence,  but  observed  that  if  on 
investigation  they  were  found  to  exist,  he  would  for  the  present 
renounce  preaching  anywhere.  The  Archbishop  shrank  from 
imposing  this  sacrifice  upon  the  zealous  young  priest,  and 
above  all  upon  the  Catholic  youth  who  were  clamoring  im- 
patiently for  him.  If  he  had  acted  on  the  impulse  of  his  own 
judgment,  he  would  have  desired  Lacordaire  to  go  on  as  he 
had  begun;  but  his  judgment  was  warped  by  pressure  from 
those  around  him,  and  by  his  ingrained  horror  of  novelty. 
The  policy  of  the  higher  clergy  at  that  time  was  to  let  well 
enough  alone,  to  make  no  stir,  above  all  to  do  nothing  new, 
and  to  avoid  giving  any  new  impulse  to  the  public  mind,  lest 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  93 

it  should  provoke  opposition,  which  it  might  be  difficult  to 
appease.  Such  a  policy  was,  as  we  have  seen,  tlie  very  anti- 
podes of  that  which  animated  Uzanam  and  his  friends,  who 
looked  to  Lacordaire  as  the  herald  of  their  cause. 

But  Lacordaire,  much  as  it  grieved  him  to  disappoint  these 
eager  young  spirits,  and  the  multitude  of  others  outside  them, 
whose  souls  were  longing  for  bread,  refrained  from  pressing 
Monseigneur  de  Qu61en  too  hard.  When  they  were  parting, 
the  latter  said, "  I  don't  forbid  you  to  resume  the  Conferences ; 
I  cannot  do  it;  but  reflect,  examine,  take  counsel."  He  was 
very  kind,  but  agitated  and  undecided.  Lacordaire  left  his 
presence  mentally  determined  not  to  resume  them.  He  com- 
municated this  decision  the  same  day  to  two  or  three  intimate 
friends,  who  confirmed  him  in  it.  A  few  days'  reflection, 
however,  made  them  change  their  opinion  as  to  its  wisdom. 

Lacordaire,  likewise,  who  felt  free  to  decide  for  himself, 
since  the  Archbishop  had  left  him  the  right  to  do  so,  began  to 
ask  himself  if  it  was  just  to  others  as  well  as  to  himself  to  dis- 
appoint these  ardent  expectations.  "  If,"  argued  his  friends, 
**you  give  up  now,  you  give  up  for  ever;  the  Archbishop  has 
not  forbidden  you;  on  the  contrary,  personally  he  sympa- 
thizes with  you.  Why  yield  to  paltry  cavilling  and  prejudice  ?  " 
A  weightier  argument  than  this  was,  that  in  lapsing  into 
silence  he  was  abandoning  a  mission  which  no  one  else  could 
fulfil. 

While  Lacordaire  was  still  hesitating,  drawn  one  way  by 
the  €l  sire  to  do  whatever  was  most  agreeable  to  his  Arch- 
bishop, and  the  other  by  the  longing  to  continue  a  fruitful 
ministry,  the  Superior  of  the  College  Stanislas  received  a 
message  from  the  Archbishop  informing  him  that  the  Con- 
ferences would  not  be  resumed  that  year.  Lacordaire  was 
immediately  apprised  of  this,  and  was  wounded  to  the  quick 
by  what  seemed  to  him  a  want  of  frankness  and  even  justice 
on  the  part  of  Monseigneur  de  Quelen.  He  wrote  to  him 
and  protested  respectfully,  but  with  the  warmth  of  just  indig- 
nation, against  the  stigma  wliich  this  direct  prohibition  cast 


94  i^\f^  ^fi^  Works  of  Frede7'ic  Ozanam. 

upon  him.     "  Monseigneur,"  he  cried,  "  I  have  but  one  talent; 
if  I   may  not  utiUze  it,  I  am  reduced  to  nothingness  as  a 
priest.     .     .     .     Monseigneur,  I  ask  for  justice  at  your  hands; 
I  claim  the  one  possession,  the  one  honor  of  a  priest — the 
nght  to  preach  Jesus  Christ,  until  at  least  I  fail  in  orthodoxy, 
which  is  the  first  of  all  things,  the  thing  which,  with  God's 
help,  I  will  never  fail  in,  never  at  least  wilfully."     There  was 
no  doubt  a  leaven  of  human  feeHng  in  this  remonstrance ;  it 
would  have  been  more  perfect  in  the  priest  to  have  bowed 
down  and  accepted  the  humiliation  in  silence;  bat  we  must, 
on  the  other  hand,  consider  that,  at  a  period  when  manly  in- 
dependence was  at  a  discount  in  all  classes,   the  dignified 
bearing  of  the  Abbe  Lacordaire  was  a  fine  and  salutary  ex- 
ample.    Monseigneur  de  Quelen,  however,  could  not  see  it 
in  this  light ;  he  was  shocked  at  the  vivacity  of  his  young 
subordinate,  but  replied,  in  a  tone  of  gentleness  and  dignity, 
that  he  feared  the  perils  of  improvisation,  and  proposed  to 
him,   as  a  condition  of  resuming  his  Conferences,  that   he 
should  write  them  out  beforehand,  and  submit  the  MS.  to  the 
censure  of  certain  persons,  who  should  be  named  for  the  pur- 
pose.      Lacordaire  knew  from  experience  that  such  a  plan 
would  utterly  paralyze  his  powers ;  he  said  so,  and,  thanking 
the  Archbishop  for  the  intended  kindness,  declared  his  deter- 
mination to  renounce  the  Conferences  altogether. 

All  this  occurred  in  December.  The  sacrifice  once  made, 
Lacordaire  was  calm  and  satisfied.  He  could  not  help  feel- 
ing, at  the  same  time,  that  his  position  was  perilously  com- 
promised. If  the  Archbishop  allowed  him  to  remain  under 
this  prohibition,  it  was  tantamount  to  an  interdict. 

Ozanam  and  his  friends  meanwhile  were  in  despair. 
Measuring  the  event  by  their  own  regrets  and  disappoint- 
ment, they  magnified  it  into  a  positive  disaster.  This  feeHng 
was  shared  by  the  Abb6  Liautard,  the  founder  of  the  College 
Stanislas,  and  its  late  Superior,  who  had  made  their  cause  his 
own.  Whatever  the  result  might  be,  this  was  a  great  moral 
victory,  for  the  Abbe  Liautard  was   a   man  whose  opinion 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  95 

had  greater  weight  perhaps  than  that  of  any  ecclesiastic  of  the 
day  in  France;  the  clergy  held  him  in  high  esteem  for  his 
zeal,  piety,  and  learning,  and  the  Government  had,  more  than 
once,  been  compelled  to  reckon  with  him,  on  account  of  his 
influence  with  the  noblest  families  in  France,  whose  sons  he 
had  educated.  The  Abbe  had  seen,  and  appreciated  better 
than  any  one,  the  effect  of  Lacordaire's  Conferences  in  the 
college  chapel;  he  had  rejoiced  as  at  the  advent  of  anew 
prophet,  and  he  was  proportionately  indignant  on  seeing  the 
Archbishop's  better  judgment  overruled  by  the  puerile  policy 
and  petty  jealousies  of  a  narrow-minded  party.  He  wrote  a 
vigorous  expostulation  on  the  subject,  condemning  boldly  the 
weakness  of  the  Archbishop's  conduct  and  administration, 
and  this  document  was  circulated  in  manuscript  amongst  the 
clergy  of  Paris,  on  whom  it  produced  a  great  effect. 

Early  in  January,  about  a  month  after  Lacordaire's  letter 
to  the  Archbisliop,  when  he  had  ceased  almost  to  think  of 
the  painful  episode,  and  was  once  more  quietly  absorbed  in 
his  studies,  he  was  one  day  walking  through  the  gardens  of 
the  Luxembourg,  when  a  friend  accosted  him,  and,  after  the 
usual  salutations,  remarked  irrelevantly,  "  Why  don't  you  go 
and  see  the  Archbishop,  and  have  an  explanation  with  him  ?  " 
The  Abb^  replied  that  there  was  nothing  further  to  explain, 
and  that  he  had  no  pretext  for  intruding  on  his  Grace.  Be- 
fore he  had  gone  many  steps  further  he  met  another  frignd, 
who  said  almost  in  the  same  words,  "  Why  don't  you  go  and 
see  Monseigneur  de  Quelen  ?  I  am  sure  he  would  be  glad 
to  see  you,  and  to  make  it  up  with  you," 

Lacordaire,  who  was  prone  enough  to  see  the  finger  of 
Providence  in  the  events  of  daily  life,  was  struck  by  the 
coincidence,  and  resolved  on  the  spot  to  go  at  once  to  the 
Rue  St.  Jacques.  *  "  It  was  not  the  portress  who  opened 
the  door,"  he  says;  "it  was  a  choir  nun,  who  liked  me, 
because,  as  she  said,   every  one  was  down  on  me.~    Mon- 

•  See  Foissct's  Life  of  Lacordaire^  vol.  i.  chap,  viii.,   for  this  incident  and  the  foregoing 


g6  Life  and  Worh  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

seigneur  had  forbidden  his  door,  it  seemed,  *  but,'  said  the 
sister,  <  I  will  go  and  tell  him  it  is  you,  and  perhaps  he  will 
see  you.'  The  answer  was  favorable.  I  found  the  Arch- 
bishop walking  up  and  down  the  room  with  a  triste,  pre- 
occupied air.  He  gave  me  but  a  slight  sign  of  welcome,  and 
I  turned  and  walked  up  and  down  with  him  without  his 
uttering  a  word.  After  a  long  silence,  he  stopped  suddenly, 
and,  looking  at  me  with  a  scrutinizing  glance,  said,  *  I  have  a 
/notion  of  confiding  to  you  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame ;  would 
you  accept  it  ?  '  The  sudden  overture,  the  motive  of  which 
was  entirely  unknown  to  me,  did  not  dazzle  me  in  the  least. 
I  replied  that  the  time  for  preparation  was  short,  the  theatre 
was  solemn,  that  though  successful  before  a  small  audience, 
I  might  easily  fail  before  an  assembly  of  four  thousand  souls. 
I  ended  by  asking  for  twenty-four  hours  to  reflect." 

What  meantime  had  worked  the  sudden  revulsion  in  the 

mind  of  the  Archbishop  ?     He  had  that  very  morning  seen 

the  Abbe  Liautard's  pamphlet,  and  had  just  finished  reading 

it  when  Lacordaire  was  unexpectedly  announced.     The  idea 

/6f  answering  and  confounding  his  own  accusers,  of  appoint- 

/   ing  Lacordaire  to  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame  for  the  Lenten 

^      sermons,  occurred  to   the  Archbishop  a  moment  before,  and 

the  coincidence  of  the  young  preacher's   arrival  when  his 

mind  was  thus  occupied  about  him  seemed  providential,  and 

Monsieur  de  Quelen  carried  out  the  impulse  as  we  have  seen. 

It  is  needless  to  say  how  triumphantly  the  unpremeditated 
step  was  justified  by  the  results.  Never  had  the  venerable 
walls  of  Notre  Dame  witnessed  so  magnificent  a  victory  from 
its  pulpit  over  the  hearts  of  men.  The  young  men  of  Paris 
were  jubilant,  none  more  so  than  Ozanam. 

"  These  Conferences  on  the  Church,  her  infallibility,  her 
constitution,  her  history,  etc.,  were  all  most  beautiful,"  he 
writes ;  "  but  the  last  was  eloquent  beyond  anything  I  ever 
heard.  Monseigneur  de  Quelen,  who  was  present  at  all  of 
them,  addressed  at  the  end  his  solemn  thanks  to  M.  Lacor- 
daire, and  named  him  canon  of  the  Cathedral.     This  does 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  97 

indeed  pour  balm  into  our  wounds!"  Nothing  could  be 
more  generous  than  the  way  in  which  the  Archbishop  gave 
this  public  testimony  of  his  admiration  to  the  man  whose  in- 
fluence he  had  for  a  moment  so  mistrusted.  When  the  last 
words  of  the  final  Conference  were  spoken,  and  the  vast 
assembly  was  about  to  kneel  to  receive  the  blessing  of  the 
Prelate,  the  latter  rose,  and  with  that  incomparable  majesty 
which  lent  such  weight  to  his  words  in  private  and  in  pubUc, 
expressed  his  thanks  to  him,  "  on  whom  God  had  bestowed 
piety  and  eloquence,  and,  still  more,  that  virtue  which  con- 
stitutes the  priest— obedience ! "  He  called  him,  moreover, 
his  "  faithful  and  excellent  friend,  the  joy  and  consolation  of 
his  heart." 

Looking  back  on  those  glorious  days  when  the  young 
ranks  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  closed,  like  the  advance-guard 
of  a  victorious  army,  round  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame,  Lacor- 
daire  once  exclaimed,  with  emotion,  "  Ah !  Ozanam  is  an 
ancestor ! " 

Ozanam,  in  his  turn,  claimed  for  his  illustrious  friend  a 
share  in  his  own  paternity  towards  the  militia  of  charity,  and 
always  spoke  of  him  as  one  of  its  early  fathers.  He  certainly 
proved  its  chivalrous  defender  in  the  hour  of  peril.  When 
a  despicable  cabal  threatened  it  with  suppression  by  the 
Government,  Lacordaire,  from  his  pulpit,  appealed  to  the 
Catholic  heart  of  France  in  behalf  of  those  young  men  "  who 
had  placed  their  chastity  under  the  guardianship  of  charity — 
the  fairest  of  virtues  under  the  faii[est  of  guardianships." 

"  What  blessings,"  he  exclaimed,  "  will  not  this  knighthood 
of  youth,  purity,  and  fraternity  draw  down  upon  France  in 
behalf  of  the  poor !  Let  the  gratitude  of  the  country  prove 
at  least  the  safeguard  of  its  liberty." 

We  will  close  this  chapter  with  a  letter  of  Ozanam*s: 

*•  Paris,  16  ^fay. 
"  In  these  days  we  have  need  of  great  virtues  and  strong  men.     It  is  true 
the  reig^n  of  evil  is  being  undermined  in  all  directions,  and  the  time  is  drawing 
ue^r  when  truth  will  be  hailed  anew  as  queen  of  the  world  ;  but  so  lon^  as 


y 


98  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 


the  earthly  life  of  humanity  lasts,  evil  will  still  live  in  the  midst  of  it ;  evil  is 
always  abroad  somewhere  on  the  earth — sometimes  as  a  tyrant,  sometimes  as 
a  slave  ;  and  its  efforts  are  never  so  formidable  as  when  it  sees  its  empire 
threatened  and  in  danger  of  escaping  from  its  grasp ;  every  religious  reaction 
is  sure  to  provoke  a  corresponding  reaction  of  impiety.  Thus  it  is  that,  while 
the  idols  of  the  eighteenth  century  see  their  shrines  deserted,  while  our  tem- 
ples, so  long  forsaken,  see  their  solitude  repeopled,  and  the  Abbe  Lacordaire 
thunders  forth  the  Word  of  God  over  an  assembly  of  six  thousand  men, 
crowded  into  the  mighty  nave  of  Notre  Dame,  while  these  things  are  being 
accomplished,  rationalism  is  not  idle  ;  it  is  busy  muliplying  its  periodical  lite- 
rature, organizing  its  seductive  propaganda,  casting  its  nets  round  the  youth 
of  the  day,  besieging  our  most  illustrious  men,  causing  the  fall  and  ruin  of 
those  who  but  yesterday  were  our  glory,  dethroning  the  Abbe  de  Lamennais 
from  the  pure  heights  where  faith  and  genius  had  placed  him,  making  us 
tremble  for  the  virginal  muse  of  Lamartine.  These  things  are  sad,  but  they 
are  true.  We  Catholics  are  punished  for  putting  our  trust  rather  in  the 
genius  of  our  great  men  than  in  the  power  of  our  God  ;  we  are  punished  for 
having  prided  ourselves  too  much  in  them  personally,  for  having  met,  with 
too  much  scorn,  the  taunts  of  the  unbelievers,  and  for  holding  up,  to  justify 
ourselves  in  their  eyes,  not  the  Cross  of  our  Redeemer,  but  our  philosophers 
and  our  poets  ;  we  are  punished  for  having  leaned  upon  those  human  reeds, 
melodious  as  they  were,  and  they  have  broken  in  our  hand.  Henceforth  we 
are  taught  to  look  higher  for  our  help  ;  it  is  not  a  fragile  staff  that  we  need  in 
journeying  through  the  world  ;  it  is  two  wings,  the  wings  that  bear  the  angels 
— faith  and  charity.  We  must  make  haste  to  fill  the  places  that  have  become 
vacant.  Genius  has  failed  us  ;  let  us  be  led  by  grace  ;  we  must  be  courageous 
and  persevering ;  we  must  love  unto  death ;  we  must  fight  unto  death.  .  .  ." 


CHAPTER  XL 

1837. 

OzANAM  terminated  his  legal  studies  by  the  usual  examina- 
tion, and  with  such  success  that  he  resolved  to  go  up,  as 
soon  as  possible,  for  the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Law.  The  bar 
was  now  open  to  him,  but  he  continued  undecided  as  to  his 
real  vocation.  He  could  not  divest  himself  of  the  feeling 
that  in  becoming  a  barrister  he  was  betraying  his  true  calling; 
that  Literature,  not  Law,  was  the  mistress  who  claimed  his 
first  allegiance,  and  who  would  best  requite  his  services. 
Reason,  interest,  the  wishes  of  his  family,  all  pleaded  in 
favor  of  the  bar,  but  he  himself  was  conscious  of  an  insur- 
mountable repugnance  to  the  profession.  Might  not  this  be 
a  warning  and  a  presentiment  ? 

*•  The  moment  of  choosing  our  destiny  is  a  solemn  one,  and  everything 
that  is  solemn  is  sad,"  he  said  to  Lallier.  *'  I  am  suffering  from  this  absence 
of  a  vocation  which  shows  me  the  dust  and  stones  of  every  road,  and  the 
flowers  of  none.  The  one  to  which  I  am  nearest  just  now,  the  bar,  strikes 
me  as  especially  uninviting.  I  have  talked  it  over  with  several  legal  men.  I 
have  seen  what  one  must  be  satisfied  to  put  up  with  in  order  to  get  business 
and  what  annoyances,  on  the  other  hand,  accompany  the  business.  People  \ 
are  fond  of  saying  that  barristers  are  the  most  independent  of  men  ;  they  are  '. 
at  least  as  much  slaves  as  the  rest,  for  they  have  tvfp  sets  of  tyrants  equally 
insupportable — ^the  attorneys  to  begin  with,  and  clients  by  and  by." 

Duty  to  his  father,  who  had  made  great  sacrifices  to  keep 
him  for  five  years  in  Paris,  pointed  emphatically  to  the  bar, 
however,  as  his  legitimate  career ;  so  Ozanam,  conquering  all 
personal  antipathies,  bravely  entered  on  his  duties  as  a  bar- 
rister. The  briefs  were  rare,  and  the  few  that  came  were  not 
followed  by  any  brilliant  results.  Here  is  his  own  account 
of  these  beginnings: 

'•  Will  it  interest  you  to  hear  something  of  the  kind  of  life  I  am  leading 
now  ?    It  is  always  the  same  odd  life,  divided  between  interrupted  studies  and 

4*v 


lOO  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanarn. 

wearisome  occupations.  I  reckon  irreverently  amongst  the  latter  the  few  briefs 
that  take  me  to  the  Courts.  The  famous  case  of  interdiction  that  was  pending 
when  you  left  has  been  pleaded  twice  since  then,  and  will  be  decided  perhaps 
to-morrow.  On  two  other  occasions  I  distinguished  myself  at  the  bar  of  the 
Civil  Tribunal  and  at  that  of  the  Police  Correctionnelle  for  some  trifling 
cases.  This  week  the  Assizes  have  given  me  plenty  to  do.  On  Monday  a 
poor  devil,  who  was  defended  by  me,  got  condemned  to  five  years'  hard  labor, 
not  so  much  for  the  crime  in  question,  which  was  not  proved,  as  for  his  ante- 
cedents, which  were  villanous  beyond  a  doubt.  The  day  before  yesterday  the 
scene  changed  ;  and  if  your  evil  genius  had  conducted  you  to  the  great  hall  of 
the  Hotel  de  Ville,  you  would  have  beheld  your  most  humble  servant  by  the 
side  of  Pitrat,  the  director  of  the  Gazette  du  Lyonnais^  cited  for  having  at- 
tacked the  King's  Government ;  you  would  have  heard  a  lengthy  harangue 
from  the  King's  counsel,  invoking  the  utmost  rigor  of  the  law  against  the 
pitiful  little  newspaper,  and  the  young  advocate  endeavoring,  according  to  his 
laudable  custom,  to  maintain  a  neutral  position  between  the  accuser  and  the 
accused,  to  justify  the  latter  without  exasperating  the  former  ;  you  would  have 
heard  a  statesman  of  four-and-twenty  delivering  judgment,  with  unblushing 
audacity,  on  the  highest  questions  of  constitutional  law,  and  on  the  weightiest 
conterhporaneous  facts.  I  cannot  tell  whether,  in  company  with  almost  the 
entire  audience,  you  would  have  counted,  at  the  close  of  the  proceedings,  on 
a  verdict  of  acquittal ;  but  I  know  for  a  fact  that,  not  being  deaf,  you  would 
have  heard  a  sentence  of  condemnation,  which,  for  not  being  unduly  severe,  was 
none  the  less  disappointing  to  the  plaintiff  and  his  counsel.  I  was  very  much 
complimented  on  my  speech  ;  but  you  know  that  my  poor  speechifying  has  the 
luck  to  gain  applause  much  oftener  than  conviction.  Having  now  led  you 
through  the  most  memorable  scenes  of  the  barristerial  life  I  have  been  leading 
these  few  months  past,  I  leave  you  to  guess  the  rest." 

In  the  month  of  April  Frederic  went  to  Paris  on  account 
of  his  approaching  examination  for  the  Doctorship  of  Letters. 
He  was  recalled  suddenly  by  the  death  of  his  father.  It  was 
no  ordinary  love  that  Doctor  Ozanam  had  inspired  in  his 
children ;  they  not  only  revered  him  as  their  father,  but  looked 
up  to  him  as  a  model  of  all  the  Christian  virtues.  Frederic 
was  fond  of  tracing  to  his  parents  every  moral  and  intellec- 
tual gift  he  possessed,  and  this  with  genuine  simplicity. 
"  You  did  not  know  him,"  he  says  to  a  friend,  to  whom  he  is 
announcing  his  loss,  "  but  if  ever  your  indulgence  found  any- 
thing in  me  worthy  of  esteem  or  love,  attribute  it  to  my  father, 
to  his  advice  and  example."  This  idea  was  not  the  result  of 
present  sorrow  j  it  was  a  conviction  which  he  retained  all  his 
life.     A  month  before  his  death^  summing  up  all  the  mercies 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozairevt,  loi 

and  blessings  of  his  life,  he  makes  the  foilowiiiji;  ithattsgiving 
for  his  father : 

••  Thou  didst  preserve  his  faith  amidst  many  evil  times.  Through  revolu- 
tions, adversities,  and  in  the  soldiers'  camp  his  nature  remained  noble ;  he 
maintained  his  sense  of  justice  unimpaired,  his  charity  to  the  poor  unwearied. 
I  bear  this  witness  to  my  father  :  when  I  was  compelled  to  the  sad  duty  of 
looking  into  his  accounts  for  the  settlement  of  our  inheritance,  I  found  that 
one-third  of  his  visits  had  been  made  without  remuneration,  to  the  poor  re- 
cognized as  such.  He  loved  science,  art,  and  labor,  and  he  sought  to  inspire 
us  with  the  love  of  the  good  and  the  beautiful.  When  he  left  the  Hussars 
he  had  read  the  Bible  of  Dom  Calmet  from  one  end  to  the  other ;  he  knew 
Latin  as  few  of  us  professors  know  it  nowadays." 

Frederic  inherited  probably  from  his  father  his  great  love 
for  the  sacred  text.  He  read  the  Bible  himself  in  Hebrew 
ever  since  he  understood  that  tongue,  and  his  mother  was 
fond  of  relating  a  little  circumstance  in  which  his  knowledge 
of  it  once  served  him  rather  humorously.  Several  Protestant 
clergymen  at  Lyons  were  in  the  habit  at  one  time  of  coming 
to  hold  theological  discussions  with  him.  One  day  one  of 
them  kept  him  four  hours  at  it,  the  point  in  dispute  being  a 
text  which  each  interpreted  differently.  At  last  Frederic  ex- 
•claimed :  "  But  why  should  a  learned  man  like  you  argue 
from  a  translation  ?  Let  us  get  the  Hebrew  version  and  fight 
it  out  over  the  original."  His  antagonist  had  to  admit  that 
he  was  not  a  Hebrew  scholar,  and  when  Ozanam  proceeded 
to  give  his  direct  translation  of  the  text  he  refused  to  accept 
it,  observing  that  he  would  consult  some  higher  authority, 
and  then  come  back  to  finish  the  argument.  "  But,"  the 
mother  of  the  young  savant  would  add  proudly,  "  he  never 
came  back ! " 

Frederic  now  devoted  all  his  energies  to  comforting  his 
mother,  and  endeavoring  to  replace  the  protector  who  had 
been  taken  from  her  when  apparendy  she  most  needed  him. 

"Happy  the  man  to  whom  God  has  given  a  holy  mother !"  he  exclaims. 
•'  But  why  is  it  decreed  that  in  proportion  as  the  halo  of  sanctity  shines  more 
brightly  round  that  beloved  head  the  shadow  of  death  dra^s'S  flfear  to  it  ?  WTiy 
in  the  languages  of  men  is  perfection  synonymous  with  the  end  ?  WTiy  does 
God  give  us  nothing  here  below,  but  only  lend  to  us  ?     O  dear  friend,  pray 


J 


50,2  Lifiand  Works  of  Fre dene  Ozanam, 

with  me  that  my  feiother  may  be  spared  to  me  ;  that  she  may  be  spared  to  my 
brothers,  who  also  have  such  need  of  her ;  that  this  home,  which  you  saw  so 
happy  and  so  full  of  love,  may  not  be  laid  desolate,  filled  with  mourning,  and 
emptied  of  all  joy,  given  as  a  spectacle  of  human  vicissitudes,  and  made  a 
scandal  for  the  unrighteous,  who,  seeing  how  severely  Christian  families  are 
dealt  with,  may  ask  in  their  insolence,  *  Where  then  is  the  God  in  whom  they 
hoped  ? '     Ubi  est  Deus  eoruni  ? 

"It  is  in  Him  that  I  have  placed  all  my  hope,  and  I  am  resolved  to  follow 
only  the  indications  He  gives  me  in  the  shifting  circumstances  of  life. 

"  I  continue  by  letters  the  steps  I  was  taking  in  Paris.  Meantime,  I  have 
not  neglected  my  literary  labors ;  they  are  always  one  of  my  most  salutary 
consolations.     I  am  still  busy  on  Dante." 

The  steps  to  which  he  alludes  had  reference  to  a  Professor- 
ship of  Commercial  Law,  which  some  influential  persons  had 
proposed  getting  established  at  Lyons  in  order  that  Ozanam 
should  be  named  to  it.  The  municipal  body,  amongst  whom 
he  had  many  friends,  received  the  suggestion  cordially,  and 
immediately  sent  up  a  petition  to  that  effect  to  the  Minister 
of  Public  Instruction  at  Paris.  Some  time  must,  however, 
elapse  before  the  affair  could  be  definitely  settled,  and  pend- 
ing this  Ozanam  worked  on  diligently  at  his  law  business. 

*'  I  have  now  pleaded  twelve  times,"  he  says  ;  "  three  times  only  before  the 
Civil  Tribunal,  where  I  gained  my  verdict  each  time.  The  emotions  of  plead- 
ing are  not  without  their  charm,  but  the  emoluments  are  slow  in  making  their 
appearance,  and  the  relations  with  men  of  business  are  so  painful,  so  humili- 
ating, so  unjust  that  I  cannot  get  reconciled  to  them.  Justice  is  the  last  moral 
asylum,  the  last  sanctuary  of  existing  society,  and  to  see  it  surrounded  with 
dirt  is  for  me  a  source  of  indignation  which  is  provoked  at  every  instant.  This 
kind  of  life  irritates  me  too  much ;  I  nearly  always  come  back  from  Court 
deeply  wounded,  for  I  find  it  as  hard  to  resign  myself  to  the  sight  of  evil  as 
to  its  endurance.  Yet  I  am  far  from  entertaining  the  idea  of  renouncing  a 
profession  which  present  circumstances  render  it  more  than  ever  essential  for 
me  to  persevere  in.  After  the  holidays  I  will  commence  a  lesson  of  law  to 
three  young  fellows  who  are  trap  grands  seigneurs  to  go  and  sit  on  the 
benches  of  the  Ecole,  and  whose  fees  I  shall  be  very  happy  to  pocket." 

The  necessity  for  securing  some  more  definite  and  satisfac- 
tory returns  than  these  chance  fees,  and  those  which  his  occa- 
sional briefs  brought  him,  made  Ozanam  turn  his  eyes  longingly 
in  the  direction  of  the  proposed  chair  of  Law,  which  was  being 
zealously  forwarded  by  his  numerous  friends  both  in  Paris  and 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam,  103 

at  Lyons.  He  was  very  sanguine  as  to  the  success  of  these 
efforts,  but  tried  to  maintain  himself  in  a  state  of  placid  indif- 
ference. 

*♦  If,"  he  says,  '*  all  these  negotiations  have  no  other  result,  they  will  at  any 
rate  have  proved  to  me  the  affection  of  my  friends  ;  the  good  wishes  of  all 
have  helped  on  the  efforts  of  many.  Meantime  I  remain  passive.  I  feel  a 
sort  of  religious  awe,  perhaps  superstition,  concerning  the  present  uncertainty 
of  my  destiny.  Having  once  placed  it  in  the  hands  of  Providence,  I  fear  to 
meddle  with  it.  It  seems  to  me  as  though  the  success  or  failure  of  this  affair 
is  to  decide  whether  I  shall  remain  in  the  world,  or  take  leave  of  it  when  cir- 
cumstances shall  have  set  me  free.  You  perceive  from  this  how  daring  my 
dreams  are,  and  to  what  sacred  heights  they  venture  to  soar.  But  in  truth  I 
envy  the  lot  of  those  who  devote  themselves  without  reserve  to  God  and  to 
humanity.  Again,  on  the  other  hand,  the  question  of  marriage  presents  it- 
self frequently  to  my  mind,  and  never  without  leaving  behind  it  the  most  in- 
credible repugnance.  I  am  weaker  than  many  others,  and  the  wanderings  of 
my  imaigination  might  easily  have  carried  my  heart  out  of  its  depth,  but  some- 
how I  feel  that  there  is  a  manly  virginity  which  is  not  devoid  of  honor  and  a 
certain  charm,  and  that  we  abdicate  this  to  a  certain  extent  in  conjugal  union. 
It  may  be  that  this  feeling  arises  from  an  unjust  contempt  for  women.  Yet 
Our  Blessed  Lady,  and  my  mother,  and  a  few  others  make  me  forgive  a  gjeat 
deal  to  those  daughters  of  Eve.  But  I  declare  to  you  that  in  general  I  do  not 
understand  them.  Their  sensibility  is  sometimes  admirable,  but  their  frivolity, 
the  inconsistency  of  their  mind,  is  hopeless.  Can  you  conceive  an)thing 
more  capricious,  more  disjointed,  than  their  conversation  ?  And  then  to  think 
of  binding  one's  self  without  reserve  and  without  end  to  the  society  of  any 
human  creature,  mortal,  infirm,  and  wretched,  let  her  be  ever  so  perfect !  It 
is  the  perpetual  nature  of  the  partnership  which  is  to  me  so  full  of  terror ;  this 
is  why  I  never  can  assist  at  a  marriage  without  shedding  tears,  as  at  an  ordi- 
nation or  a  taking  of  the  veil.  I  never  could  understand  the  gayety  that  one 
generally  sees  at  weddings.  .  .  .  About  a  week  ago  a  prolonged  medita- 
tion on  my  own  wretchedness,  internal  and  extemaJ,  threw  my  mind  into  such 
a  state  of  perturbation  that  I  was  reduced  to  the  impossibility  of  either  think- 
ing or  acting.  My  brain  was  on  fire,  driven  in  every  sense  by  the  most  dread- 
ful thoughts  and  fancies.  At  last  the  excess  of  the  evil  compelled  me  to  have 
recourse  to  the  physician — the  physician,  I  mean,  who  has  the  secret  of  all  hu- 
man infirmities,  as  well  as  the  balm  of  Divine  grace.  Well,  when,  with  an 
energy  which  I  seldom  display  on  such  occasions,  I  had  laid  bare  my  misery 
and  my  distress  to  the  charitable  man  whom  I  address  as  *  father,'  what  do 
you  think  he  said  to  me  ?  He  answered  me  in  the  words  of  the  apostle : 
Gaudete  in  Domino  semper.  You  will  admit  tliat  it  was  a  strange  reply.  A 
poor  fellow  has  just  had  the  greatest  misfortune  which  can  befall  him  in  the 
spiritual  order,  that  of  offending  God  ;  the  greatest  misfortune  which  could 
befall  him  in  the  natural  order,  that  of  losing  his  father  ;  he  has  an  aged  and 
infirm  mother,  whose  every  movement,  every  look,  every  expression  he  watches 


IC4  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

from  day  to  day  to  see  how  long  she  is  hkely  to  be  spared  to  him  ;  he  finds 
himself  detached  by  absence  or  by  death  from  many  friends  who  were  dear  to 
him  ;  he  is,  over  and  above  all  this,  a  prey  to  anxiety  about  a  most  precarious 
future,  overpowered  with  troubles  and  business  of  a  most  disagreeable  na- 
ture ;  *  if  he  falls  back  upon  himself  in  order  to  escape  from  what  is  painful 
without,  he  finds  nothing  but  imperfections,  weakness,  and  faults,  .  .  . 
and  in  the  teeth  of  all  this  he  is  to]d,  not  to  be  resigned,  to  take  comfort,  but 
to  xt.\d\Q.&—gatidete  semper  I  It  needs  assuredly  all  the  boldness,  all  the  pious 
insolence  of  Christianity  to  hold  such  language.  And  yet  Christianity  is 
right." 

The  added  dignity  of  Doctor  of  Law,  which  the  young 
barrister  had  acquired  this  year,  does  not  seem  to  have  at- 
tached him  more  closely  to  the  profession,  which,  so  far, 
yielded  but  slight  encouragement;  clients  continued  scarce, 
and  during  the  following  year  he  made  but  little  head  against 
the  difficulties  of  a  beginner. 

In  a  letter  where  he  announces  the  approaching  marriage 
of  a  friend,  Frederic  observes  that,  in  order  to  fortify  himself 
against  the  matrimonial  contagion,  he  set  off  to  visit  la 
Grande  Cha?'freiise  : 

•'  I  shall  not  attempt  to  tell  all  I  saw  ;  suffice  it  to  say  that  I  beheld  scenery 
which  I  have  not  the  talent  to  describe,  and  men  whom  I  shall  never  have  the 
strength  to  imitate.  The  impression  left  by  this  pilgrimage,  however,  is  very 
different  from  what  I  anticipated.  I  had  heard  of  nothing  but  sublime  hor- 
rors— torrents,  precipices,  deserts,  frightful  austerities ;  instead  of  all  this,  I 
found  a  delightful  solitude,  a  magnificent  vegetation,  rich  meadows,  forests 
where  the  green  foliage  of  the  beech  intermingled  with  the  gloomy  shade  of 
the  fir-trees,  rocks  on  which  roses  flowered,  rivulets  bounding  in  elegant  cas- 
cades over  beds  of  sward  and  moss,  on  every  side  masses  of  blue  campanulas, 
broad  feathery  ferns  like  diminutive  palm-trees,  flocks  and  herds  on  the 
mountains,  birds  in  the  woods  ;  and  there  in  the  valley  the  mighty,  majestic 
monastery  ;  the  monks  with  serene  countenances  beneath  their  antique  cowl, 
their  features  beaming  with  peace  and  happiness  ;  chants  rising,  full  and  har- 
monious, at  every  hour  of  the  day  ;  hymns  ascending  to  Heaven  in  the  silent 
night-time,  when  crimes  are  being  multiplied  on  the  earth,  and  the  vengeance 
of  God  is  provoked  ;  then  the  lovely  chapels  of  Notre  Dame  at  Casaliban,  and 
of  Bruno,  with  their  fountains  and  their  memories  of  seven  hundred  years. 
Perhaps  it  is  a  far-fetched  fancy  of  mine,  but  La  Chartreuse,  suspended  thus  in 
a  hollow  of  the  mountain,  seems  to  me  like  a  nest  in  the  desert,  where  holy 

*  The  duty  of  collecting  and  administering  his  father's  limited  means  had  devolred  entirely  on 
Frederic,  and  brought  his  sensitive  nature  in  contact  with  much  selfishness  and  worldly  hvd- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  105 

souls  are  gathered  together  and  hatched  under  the  maternal  wings  of  religion 
until  they  have  attained  their  maturity,  when  they  peacefully  take  flight  to 
heaven. 

"  Religion,  like  a  mother  full  of  indulgent  kindness,  as  she  is,  has  surround- 
ed this  sacred  nest  with  all  the  harmonies  of  nature  and  all  the  graces  of  crea- 
tion. And  it  is  a  fact  worthy  of  remark  that  hermits  and  monks  of  all  times, 
while  cutting  themselves  off  from  the  artificial  pleasures  of  society,  and  exiling 
themselves  from  the  tumult  and  enjoyments  of  the  city,  and  maltreating  their 
flesh,  never  denied  themselves  the  delights  of  the  eyes,  but  chose  for  their  soli- 
tude picturesque  sites,  extensive  views,  and  magnificent  landscapes.  This  re- 
mark is  verified  at  every  step  in  Italy,  where  every  other  mountain- top  is 
crowned  with  a  monastery.  It  was  the  same  in  our  old  France  long  ago. 
Wherever  there  was  a  bold,  overhanging  mountain,  a  smiling  valley,  a  forest 
with  sombre  shade,  the  traveller  was  sure  to  descry  a  steeple  surmounted  by  a 
cross,  and  to  meet  traces  of  the  anchorite's  sandals  on  the  lonely  pathways. 

"  Nature,  in  her  virginity,  is  profoundly  Christian  ;  she  abounds  in  sol- 
emn sadness  and  ineffable  consolations  ;  she  speaks  but  of  death  and  resurrec- 
tion, of  past  faults  and  future  glorifications.  Mountains  especially  have  a 
voice  which  appeals  to  the  soul,  of  which  they  are  in  a  certain  sense  the  image 
— riches  and  nakedness,  immeasurable  height  and  fathomless  abysses,  im- 
mense disorder,  traces  of  bygone  convulsions,  soaring  peaks,  efforts  to  reach 
the  skies,  ever  powerless,  ever  renewed  1  Is  not  all  this  a  symbol  of  our  life 
here  below  ?  Mountains,  with  their  variety,  resemble  human  nature,  as  the 
ocean,  in  its  immensity,  resembles  the  Divine  nature.  So  it  is  that  the  globe, 
which  we  tread  under  our  feet,  is  a  tablet  on  which  are  written,  in  indelible 
characters,  the  lessons  of  a  sublime  philosophy,  and  this  philosophy  is  none 
other  than  that  which  is  written  in  letters  no  less  indelible  in  the  pages  of  the 
Gospel." 

To  some  who  knew  Frederic  from  his  childhood,  and 
witnessed  his  piety,  and  his  enthusiasm  for  the  silent,  heroic 
life  of  the  cloister,  it  was  rather  a  surprise  that  he  manifested 
no  signs  of  a  vocation  in  that  direction ;  but  this  sympathy 
was,  in  truth,  more  ideal  than  practical.  Pure  as  his  heart 
was,  and  sustained  as  was  the  flight  of  his  soul  in  those  bright 
and  lofty  regions,  there  was  in  his  nature  a  chord  of  human 
tenderness  which  had  hitherto  remained  silent,  and  only  now, 
for  the  first  time,  began  to  warn  him  of  its  presence  by  certain 
faint  vibrations  which  he  confides  to  a  friend,  who  has  writ- 
ten to  inform  him  of  his  intended  marriage  : 

"  Love  has  this  in  common  with  the  divine  nature,  that  it  gives  without  im- 
poverishing itself,  that  it  communicates  itself  without  growing  less,  that  it 
multipUes  itself,  is  present  in  many  places  at  the  same  time,  and  that  its  inten- 


io6  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

sity  augments  in  proportion  as  it  expands.  In  your  wife  you  will  love  first 
God,  whose  precious  and  admirable  work  she  is,  and  then  humanity,  that  race 
of  Adam  of  whom  she  is  the  pure  and  gentle  daughter  ;  her  tenderness  will  be 
your  consolation  in  days  of  sorrow,  and  you  will  draw  courage  from  her  ex- 
ample in  moments  of  peril ;  you  will  be  her  guardian  angel,  and  she  will  be 
yours.  Henceforth  you  will  know  no  more  faintheartedness,  no  more  discou- 
ragement, nor  any  of  those  vain  terrors  which  are  apt  to  seize  upon  us  at  cer- 
tain moments  of  our  lives,  for  you  will  no  longer  be  alone  ;  you  will  never 
again  be  alone  ;  the  union  you  are  about  to  contract  will  be  immortal ;  what 
God  has  once  united  He  will  not  part ;  He  will  surround  with  one  glory  in 
heaven  those  whom  He  made  companions  here  below  in  the  same  exile. 

"  But  I  am  stammering  in  a  language  which  I  do  not  know,  and  talking  of 
things  which  have  not  been  revealed  to  me.  With  me,  imagination  was  de- 
veloped early,  but  sensibility  mucn  later.  Although  I  am  at  what  is  called 
the  age  of  the  passions,  I  have  as  yet  scarcely  felt  their  first  approach.  My 
poor  head  has  had  to  suffer  a  good  deal,  but  my  heart  has  as  yet  known  no  af- 
fections but  those  of  kindred  and  friendship.  And  yet  it  seems  to  me,  for 
some  time  past,  that  I  am  conscious  of  symptoms  that  are  the  foreshadowing 
of  a  new  order  of  sentiment,  and  I  am  frightened  at  it.  I  feel  a  void  growing 
within  me  which  neither  friendship  nor  study  can  fill.  I  know  not  who  is  des- 
tined to  fill  it.  Will  it  be  God,  or  will  it  be  a  creature  ?  If  it  is  to  be  a  crea- 
ture, I  pray  that  she  may  present  herself  as  late  as  possible,  when  I  shall  have 
become  worthy  of  her.  I  pray  that  she  may  bring  with  her  just  enough  of  ex- 
ternal charms  to  leave  no  room  for  regret ;  but,  above  all,  I  pray  that  she  may 
be  endowed  with  an  excellent  soul,  with  great  virtues ;  that  she  may  be  infi- 
nitely better  than  I  am  ;  that  she  may  lead  me  upwards,  and  never  let  me  de- 
scend ;  that  she  may  b^  courageous,  because  I  am  often  pusillanimous ;  that 
she  may  be  fervent,  because  I  am  lukewarm  in  the  things  of  God  ;  and,  lastly, 
that  she  may  be  compassionate,  so  that  I  may  not  have  to  blush  before  her  on 
account  of  my  inferiority.  Such  are  my  dreams,  but,  as  I  have  said,  nothing 
is  more  impenetrable  to  me  than  my  own  future," 

Ozanam  began  now  to  realize  the  difficulty  for  him, 
amounting  to  impossibility,  of  combining  the  profession  of 
the  bar  with  the  pursuit  of  Hterature,  as  he  understood  it. 

"...  Once  upon  a  time,"  he  says,  "I  used  to  flatter  myself  that  my 
life  might  be  divided  in  equal  portions  between  action  and  study,  one  half 
given  up  to  the  tumult  of  business,  the  other  devoted  to  the  peaceful  cultiva- 
tion of  letters  ;  but  now  I  find  myself  fatally  impelled  to  the  painful  alterna- 
tive of  abandoning  one  or  other  of  these  careers,  which  I  had  fondly  hoped  to 
combine.  My  poor  head  is  not  big  enough  to  hold  one  train  of  thought  with- 
out turning  out  all  rivals.  Literature  can  never  be  a  relaxation  for  me.  Yt»u 
have  seen  with  your  own  eyes  what  it  costs  me  to  write ;  and  yet,  whether 
from  self-love  or  some  other  better  motive,  I  cannot  bring  myself  to  bid  a 
final  farewell  to  that  severe  mistress  who  makes  me  pay  so  dearly  for  her  in- 
tercourse.    On  the  other  hand,  I  feel  that  if  I  had  devoted  exclusively  to  the 


Life  and  Works  of  Fredrric  Ozanam.  107 

study  of  law  all  the  faculties  God  has  given  me  during  the  five  years'  so- 
journ in  Paris,  I  might  have  attained  to  a  position  at  the  bar  at  which  I  can 
now  never  hope  to  arrive. " 

While  suffering  from  this  uncertainty  and  agitation,  Oza- 
nam  was  always  ready  to  combat  in  others  a  like  sense  of  de- 
pression and  discouragement.  "  Yes,"  he  says  to  a  fellow- 
student,  who  was  hesitating  at  that  point  where  the  roads  of 
life  diverge — "  yes,  we  are  useless  servants,  but  we  are  ser- 
vants, and  the  wages  are  given  only  on  condition  that  we  do 
the  work  in  the  vineyard  of  the  Lord  in  that  precise  place 
that  is  assigned  to  us.  Yes,  life  is  contemptible,  if  we  con- 
sider the  use  we  make  of  it ;  but  not  if  we  calculate  the  use 
we  may  make  of  it  if  we  look  upon  it  as  the  most  perfect  work 
of  the  Creator — the  sacred  garment  with  which  the  Divine 
humanity  clothed  Himself.  Oh  !  then  life  is  beautiful,  and 
worthy  of  all  reverence  and  love.  Let  us  pray  for  one  an- 
other, my  dear  friend  ;  let  us  mistrust  our  mistrust,  our  ennuis^ 
and  our  sadness.  Let  us  follow  with  simplicity  the  lead  of 
our  merciful  Providence,  satisfied  just  to  see  the  stone  on 
which  we  place  our  foot  at  each  successive  step,  and  without 
trying  to  discover  the  whole  length  of  the  road,  nor  its  turns 
and  windings." 

His  own  cares  and  anxieties  left  abundant  room  in  his 
thoughts  for  those  of  others.  He  had  taken  great  interest  in 
the  proposed  journey  of  a  young  artist  companion,  M.  Jan- 
mot,  to  Italy,  and,  after  giving  him  all  the  hints  he  could  be- 
forehand as  to  the  best  way  of  profiting  to  the  full  by  his 
d\)portunity,  he  goes  over  the  ground  in  imagination  with 
him  on  the  traveller's  return. 

"...  I  assume  that  when  this  letter  reaches  you  it  will  find  you  still  under 
the  impression  of  the  delightful  journey  you  have  just  made  through  Umbria, 
If  I  am  not  mistaken,  it  is  one  of  the  most  beautiful  countries  of  beautiful 
Italy  ;  the  majesty  of  great  mountains  crowning  fair  and  smiling  valleys  ;  con- 
trasting climates  ranged  as  in  an  amphitheatre  to  make  room  for  all  the  riches 
of  vegetation  from  the  pine  and  the  oak  to  the  orange-tree  and  the  aloe  ;  cities 
planted  or  suspended  here  and  there  in  the  most  imposing  attitudes,  and  every 
city,  every  hill,  every  rivulet,  every  stone  abounding  in  memories:  Spoleto, 
whose  humble  gates  remained  closed  against  Hannibal,  while   Capua's  fell 


io8  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

back  at  the  first  sound  of  his  footsteps ;  the  lake  of  Trasiniena,  where  two 
giant  peoples  fought  with  such  fell  fury  that,  while  the  fight  raged,  an  earth- 
quake destroyed  whole  towns  without  its  being  felt ;  Orvieto  and  its  Etruscan 
antiquities,  the  inheritance  of  a  civilization  that  passed  away  and  left  no  his- 
tory behind  it ;  the  lonely  lake  of  Bolsena,  and  the  island  where  a  queen  died 
of  hunger.  And  then  the  Christian  traditions  that  have  purified  and  em- 
balmed all  these  places  !  Here  we  have  the  miracle  of  Bolsena  immortalized 
by  Raphael ;  there  the  marvellous  legend  of  St.  Margaret  of  Cortona  ;  but  be- 
yond and  above  all  floats  the  great  memory  of  St.  Francis.  I  don't  remember 
whether  it  is  at  Foligno  that  they  show  you  the  rose-tree  on  whose  thorns  he 
lay  an  entire  night,  and  which  ever  since  remains  laden  with  flowers  perpet- 
ually renewed.  It  was  on  Monte  Alverno  that  the  glorious  stigmata  were  im- 
printed on  his  hands  and  feet.  It  was  along  the  roads  through  which  you 
passed  that  he  used  to  go  calling  to  the  little  birds  to  come  and  sing  the  praises 
of  God  ;  it  was  there  that  he  gave  his  cloak  in  exchange  for  the  lamb  which  the 
butchers  were  leading  to  the  slaughter.  But  it  is,  above  all,  Assisi  that  is  full 
ot  him  ;  Assisi  and  its  cloister,  that  contained  formerly  six  thousand  monks, 
and  its  two  churches,  symbol  of  the  twofold  life  of  the  saint,  one  terrestrial 
and  mysterious,  the  other  immortal  and  resplendent — its  two  churches,  where 
the  inspired  painting  of  the  middle  ages  unfolds  itself  from  its  cradle  to  its 
maturity,  from  Cimabue  and  Giotto  to  the  days  of  Perugino  and  his  disciple. 
.  .  .  And  we,  my  dear  friend,  shall  we  do  nothing  to  resemble  those  saints 
whom  we  love  ?  shall  we  remain  satisfied  with  mourning  over  the  sterility  of 
the  present,  while  we  each  one  of  us  carry  in  our  hearts  a  form  of  sanctity 
which  would  blossom  forth  at  the  mere  bidding  of  our  will  ?  ...  If,  in  the 
middle  ages,  a  deceased  society  could  only  be  cured  by  the  immense  effusion 
of  love  which  was  poured  upon  it  especially  by  St.  Francis  of  Assisi ;  if  later 
on  new  sufferings  called  for  the  healing  hands  of  St.  Philip  Neri,  St.  John  of 
God,  and  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  how  much  greater  need  have  we  now  of  charity, 
of  self-devotion,  of  patience,  to  cure  the  sufferings  of  the  nations  !  .  .  ,  The 
question  which  divides  men  in  our  day  is  no  longer  a  question  of  political 
forms,  it  is  a  social  question — that  of  deciding  whether  the  spirit  of  egotism  or 
the  spirit  of  sacrifice  is  to  carry  the  day  ;  whether  society  is  to  be  a  huge  traffic 
for  the  benefit  of  the  strongest,  or  the  consecration  of  each  for  the  benefit  of 
all,  and  above  all  for  the  protection  of  the  weak.  There  are  many  who  have 
already  too  much,  and  who  wish  to  possess  still  more  ;  there  are  a  greater  num- 
ber who  have  not  enough,  and  who  want  to  seTze  it  if  it  is  not  given  to  them. 
Between  these  two  classes  of  men  a  struggle  is  imminent,  and  it  threatens  to 
be  terrible — on  one  side  the  power  of  gold,  on  the  other  the  power  of  despair. 
It  is  between  these  two  opposing  armies  that  we  must  precipitate  ourselves,  if 
not  to  prevent,  at  least  to  break,  the  shock.  Our  youth  and  the  mediocrity  of 
our  position  makes  easy  this  role  of  mediatorship  which  our  title  of  Chris- 
tians renders  obligatory," 


CHAPTER  XIL 

1838-9. 

Towards  the  close  of  1838  Ozanam  went  up  for  his  de- 
gree of  Doctor  of  Letters.  His  Latin  thesis  was  on  the  de- 
scent of  the  heroes  into  hell,  a  study  from  the  ancient  poets. 
Dante  was  the  subject  of  the  French  one.  The  success  of 
the  first  was  marked,  but  that  of  the  latter  surpassed  the  liigh- 
est  hopes  of  his  most  admiring  friends.  It  was  more  than  a 
success,  it  was  a  revelation.  Frenchmen  had  hitherto  known 
the  great  Florentine  poet  almost  exclusively  as  the  singer  of 
Francesca  di  Rimini's  woes,  and  of  the  ghastly  tragedy  of  the 
Hunger  Tower;  they  had  not  discovered  that  he  was  a  theo- 
logian as  well  as  a  poet,  and  that  his  influence  had  been  as 
fertile  and  enduring  on  the  religious  feeling  of  his  country- 
men as  upon  their  art.  Oxanam  had  studied  the  character 
and  the  genius  of  Dante  until  he  had  come  to  love  him  with 
something  of  religious  enthusiasm.  In  revealing  the  unsus- 
pected beauties  of  the  )f»athetic,  mysterious  figure,  he  rose  to 
heights  of  inspiration  which  it  is  seldom  given  to  human  elo- 
quence to  reach,  and  never  except  when  it  is  the  inspired 
messenger  of  the  soul.  He  evoked  the  spirit  of  the  dead 
poet,  and  bid  the  living  look  upon  him.  As  at  the  voice  of  a 
magician,  the  clouds  rolled  away,  and  the  luminous  figure 
stood  revealed  against  the  background  of  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury, crowned  with  its  triple  halo  of  exile,  poet,  and  theolo- 
gian. The  audience,  spellbound  with  admiration,  listened  in 
breathless  silence.  M.  Cousin,  one  of  the  examiners,  and  a 
qualified  judge  of  eloquence,  bore  it  while  he  could;  but  at 
last,  like  one  beside  himself,  he  cried  out,  "  Ozanam,  how  is 
it  possible  to  be  so  eloquent  ?"  Tears  flowed  on  every  side 
and  choked  applause,  until  the  orator,  himself  overcome  with 

109 


it  16  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

emotion,  descended  from  that  tribune  which  he  had  con- 
quered as  the  pedestal  of  his  future  glory;  then  the  entire 
hall  rose  with  an  irrepressible  shout.  This  thesis,  so  long  and 
laboriously  prepared,  was  the  kernel  of  a  volume  which  Oza- 
nam published  later,  under  the  title  of  Dante  et  la  Philosophie 
Catholiqne  au  Treizieme  Steele. 

The  affair  of  the  Chaire  de  Droit  was  still  undecided,  and 
continued  to  drag  on  in  endless  preliminaries  and  negotia- 
tions. 

His  mother's  rapidly-declining  health  increased  his  anxiety 
to  obtain  the  appointment.  "  I  am  witnessing  the  saddest  of 
all  spectacles,"  he  writes  to  Lallier — "  the  failing  of  my  poor 
mother's  strength.  In  proportion  as  her  sight  steadily  decays 
her  moral  energy  gives  way ;  her  sensibility  seems  to  increase 
with  our  anxieties." 

His  inability  to  remove  from  his  mother's  mind  this  poig- 
nant anxiety  concerning  the  future  of  her  younger  sons,  and 
surrounding  her  last  days  with  peace  and  comfort,  was  a  con- 
stant thorn  in  his  heart. 


"After  all  the  sacrifices  my  dear  father  made  for  my  education,"  he  sa5rs, 
*'  I  ou^^ht  to  be  able  to  replace  him  now,  and  to  be  the  support  of  my  family  ; 
I  am,  on  the  contrary,  only  an  additional  burden.  A  lesson  in  law  which  I 
give  every  day  is  the  most  stable  part  of  my  income  ;  my  clients  leave  me 
large  leisure.  With  the  exception  of  two  cases  at  the  assizes,  which  made  a 
good  deal  of  noise  and  very  little  money,  and  two  law-suits  which  I  conciliat- 
ed, one  that  I  pleaded  before  the  Tribunal  of  Commerce  last  week,  a  memo- 
rial which  I  drew  up  in  a  dispute  between  two  tradesmen,  a  certain  number  of 
consultations  gratis,  I  have  had  nothing  to  do  for  the  last  five  months  in  this 
worthy  profession  of  the  bar,  one  of  those  at  the  end  of  which  a  man  is  surest 
of  making  a  fortune  provided  he  does  not  die  of  hunger  at  the  beginning  ;  and 
yet -must  I  confess  it  ? -these  small  itenns  of  business  are  stiil  repugnant  to 
me.  I  cannot  get  acclimatized  in  the  atmosphere  of  chicanery ;  discussions 
that  turn  solely  on  pecuniary  interests  are  painful  tome.  There  never  was  a 
case  so  good  but  that  there  are  wrongs  on  both  sides  ;  and  let  a  defence  be 
ever  so  legal,  one  has  always  some  weak  point  to  dissemble.  There  are  habits 
of  hyperbole  and  reticence  which  the  most  respectable  members  of  the  bar 
practise,  and  which  one  must  submit  to  ;  all  the  figures  of  rhetoric  are  reduc- 
ed into  action  before  the  tribunals  which  recognize  no  other  language.  It  is 
understood  that  you  are  to  claim  two  hundred  francs  damages  when  you  only 
want  fifty  ;  that  your  client  is  infallibly  right  in  everything  he  alleges,  and 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozandm,  111 

that  his  adversary  is  a  scoundrel.  Venture  to  express  yourself  in  more  re«r 
sonable  terms,  and  you  are  set  down  as  having  given  in,  made  concessions, 
confessed  yourself  conquered ;  your  colleag:ues  reproach  you  ;  your  client 
cries  out  that  he  is  betrayed  ;  and  if  you  happen  to  meet  in  society  one  of 
the  judges  who  presided  in  the  case,  he  accosts  you  with  *  My  dear  fellow, 
you  are  too  timid  ! '  " 

Ozanam's  leisure  at  the  bar  left  him  plenty  of  time  for  lite- 
rary work,  and  he  employed  it  in  enlarging  his  thesis  on  Dante, 
which  had  grown  imperceptibly  to  the  dimensions  of  a  vol- 
ume, and  which  he  finished  in  the  month  of  May,  and  sent 
on  to  Paris  for  publication. 

At  last  the  long  delays  came  to  an  end,  and  on  the  2ist  of 
February,  1839,  he  announces  his  official  appointment: 

"  The  Municipjal  Council,  by  a  majority  of  twenty-eight  votes  out  of  thirty- 
six,  has  named  me  Professor  of  Commercial  Law.  This  nomination  has  yet  to 
be  confirmed  by  the  Minister  of  Public  Instruction.  I  have  therefore  written  to 
M.  Cousin  to  say  that,  while  gratefully  thanking  him  for  the  offer  of  the 
Chair  of  Philosophy  at  Orleans,  I  was  moved  by  a  sense  of  duty  to  my  family 
to  choose  the  Chair  of  Law  at  Lyons." 

M.  Cousin,  who  was  well  acquainted  with  Ozanam,  judged 
rightly  that  Pliilosophy  was  a  fitter  sphere  for  him  than  Law, 
and,  pending  the  ultimate  decision  of  the  municipality,  he  had 
written  to  his  young  friend  offering  him  the  Philosophical  pro- 
fessorship at  Orleans.  The  offer  was  tempting,  and  it  was 
not  without  a  struggle  that  Ozanam  declined  it. 

"  Tell  me  what  you  think  of  my  choice,"  he  says  to  Lallier,  '*  and  what  my 
friends  in  Paris  think  of  it.  Here  I  have  been  almost  blamed  for  it.  Most 
people  were  of  opinion  that  my  true  interests  were  on  the  banks  of  the  Loire. 
For  myself,  I  confess  that  I  was  attracted  by  the  prospect  of  an  exclusively 
intellectual  career— an  existence  which  henceforward  would  have  been  irrevo- 
cably fixed,  and  consequently  peaceful ;  the  neighborhood  of  Paris  also  drew 
me  ;  but,  as  a  set-off  against  this,  there  was  the  total  isolation  in  a  strange 
town,  the  necessity  of  leaving  my  mother  for  six  months  of  the  year,  with  the 
riskof  receiving  some  day  a  letter  like  that  of  the  1 2th  of  May,  1837.*  .  .  .  There 
is  some  talk  of  founding  a  School  of  Law  in  these  parts  ;  and  if  so,  the  muni- 
cipal Professor  would  stand  a  fair  chance  of  getting  a  chair  there — that  is  to 
say,  an  honorable  position /br  li/e,  with  the  right  of  enlarging  the  sphere  of  his 
lectures  as  much  as  he  liked.  If  God  gives  me  life  and  strength,  and  settles  me 
by  a  definite  vocation  in  these  quiet  functions,  I  should  like  to  bring  my  per- 

*  Announcing  his  Cher's  accident. 


112  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

sonal  labors  into  harmony  with  my  public  duties  by  writing  a  book  on  the 
Philosophy  and  the  History  of  Law,  treated  from  the  Christian  point  of  view ; 
this,  it  seems  to  me,  would  fill  up  a  great  void  in  science." 

His  nomination  to  the  Municipal  Chair  was  settled  finally 
in  the  month  of  July.  M.  Cousin  writes  himself  to  announce 
it: 

"  My  Dear  Ozanam  :  I  did  not  write  to  you  so  long  as  I  had  nothing  posi- 
tive to  tell  you.  Now  I  come  to  announce  to  you  that  in  the  council  of  yester- 
day it  was  settled  that  you  were  to  be  named  to  the  Chair  of  Commercial 
Law. 

"  I  would  much  rather  have  seen  you  in  my  own  regiment,  but  I  don't  de- 
spair of  it  yet,  and  in  any  case  I  am  satisfied  that  with  me,  or  without  me,  you 
will  always  love  and  serve  true  philosophy. 

*'  Don't  quite  forget  me,  for  you  are  always  sure  to  find  in  me  a  friend." 

These  personal  matters  did  not  make  him  relax  his  active 
interest  in  the  progress  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul. 

♦'  Our  little  Society,"  he  writes  to  Lallier,  "  has  become  sufficiently  impor- 
tant to  be  regarded  in  the  light  of  a  providential  fact.  See  that  you  are  pre- 
sent as  often  as  possible  at  the  particular  meetings  ;  call  on  the  presidents  from 
time  to  time  ;  take  an  interest  in  the  meetings  of  the  board  of  direction.  .  .  . 
I  fully  approve  of  your  idea  of  speaking  in  a  forthcoming  letter  of  the  exterior 
spirit  of  the  Society,  the  absence  of  secrecy,  and  the  necessity  for  remaining  in 
the  background.  It  would  perhaps  be  well  to  lay  down  this  principle,  that  hu- 
mility is  obligatory  for  associations  quite  as  much  as  for  individuals,  and  you 
might  illustrate  it  by  the  example  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  who  severely  repri- 
manded a  priest  of  the  mission  for  speaking  of  the  Society  as  '  our  holy  society.' 
Servi  inutiles  sumus  is  the  testimony  which  those  who  serve  God  and  their  fel- 
low-men should  bear  to  themselves.  It  would  then  be  well  to  dwell  a  little  on 
the  nature  of  humihty,  and  to  show  how  it  should  exclude  all  collective  pride, 
which  disguises  itself  so  often  under  the  name  of  love  of  a  community,  and 
those  imprudent  displays  before  strangers  under  pretext  of  edification  or  pro- 
selytism.  On  the  other  hand,  one  might  mention  that  silence  is  not  the  inevi- 
table form  of  true  humility,  but  may  sometimes  be  even  contrary  to  it,  for 
people  are  only  silent  concerning  what  they  believe  to  be  important,  and  they 
compensate  themselves  amongst  each  other  for  the  admiration  they  cannot 
claim  from  without.  Thus,  not  to  show  ourselves^  but  to  let  ourselves  be  seen^ 
might  be  our  formula,  and  it  is  pretty  much  the  one  that  we  find  amidst  the 
maxims  of  a  great  apostle  of  charity,  St.  Francis  de  Sales.  We  have  had 
ample  opportunity  here  of  practising  this  doctrine,  surrounded  as  we  have 
been  by  two  kinds  of  dangers.  On  one  hand  the  rivalry  of  some  other  pious 
confraternities,  and  on  the  other  the  too  expansive  zeal  of  certain  members 
who  went  about  praising  our  little  work;  the  exaggeration  of  the  reports 
made  us  appear  suspicious  in  the  eyes  of  the  former,  and  ridiculous  in  those  of 


Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  113 

others.  It  was  prophesied  to  us  that  publicity  would  be  our  death ;  but, 
thank  God,  the  prophets  of  evil  have  proved  false  ones.  We  kept  ourselves 
lowly  ;  people  pitied  us  and  allowed  us  to  live. 

'•I  will  tell  you,  in  a  letter  addressed  to  M.  Bailly,  about  another  work 
which  we  have  undertaken  without  prejudice  to  this  one,  and  which  it  would 
be  desirable  to  see  established  wherever  there  is  a  conference ;  that  is,  the 
propagation  of  Christian  instruction  amongst  the  soldiers  of  the  garrisons. 
Here  we  have  got  up  a  library  and  a  school  for  reading,  writing,  and  arithme- 
tic for  the  soldiers,  and  already  the  results  are  consoling." 

It  was  not,  however,  to  be  expected  that  a  work  of  such 
growing  importance  as  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul 
should  attain  its  maturity  without  making  enemies  and  en- 
countering opposition. 

♦'  It  is  impossible  to  blind  ourselves  to  the  fact,"  says  Ozanam  ;  •*  the  society 
has  everywhere  met  with  mistrust.  If  at  Lyons  it  hcis  escaped  the  censure  of 
the  ecclesiastical  authorities,  if  even  a  few  venerable  priests  have  encouraged 
it,  it  has  never  ceased  to  be  the  object  of  vexations  on  the  part  of  seculars,  the 
big-wigs  of  orthodoxy,  fathers  of  the  council  in  dress-coats  and  strapped  pan- 
taloons, doctors  who  lay  down  the  law  between  the  morning's  newspaper  and 
their  business  accounts ;  persons  to  whom  whatever  is  new  is  unwelcome,  and 
by  whom  everything  emanating  from  Paris  is  assumed  to  be  wicked,  whose 
personal  opinion  on  politics  is  a  thirteenth  article  of  the  creed  to  them,  who 
appropriate  works  of  charity  as  their  own  belongings,  and  declare  modestly, 
putting  themselves  in  the  place  of  our  Lord,  'Whosoever  is  not  with  me  is 
against  me.'  You  would  hardly  believe  the  tricks,  the  cavilling,  the  insults, 
the  meannesses  we  had  to  bear  from  these  people,  who  are  all  in  perfectly 
good  faith.  The  most  estimable  have  been  carried  away  by  the  general  feel- 
ing, and  we  had  a  great  deal  to  suffer  even  from  those  who  love  us.  But  why 
should  we  complain  when  we  have  to  do  with  a  generation  which  anathema- 
\y'  tizes  M.  Lacordaire,  declares  M.  de  Ravignan  unintelligible,  and  the  Abbe 
Caeur  a  man  to  be  suspected  ?  Chaurand  and  I,  as  chief  founders  and  promo- 
ters of  the  work,  have  been  continually  in  the  breach,  and  find  it  a  very  weari- 
some post ;  one's  spirit  must  iirbibe  a  certain  bitterness,  charity  must  more  or 
less  suffer  in  the  conversations  that  one  is  forced  to  have  on  this  subject.  On 
the  other  hand,  there  is  a  heavy  responsibility  attached  to  our  ofi&ce,  humble 
as  it  is,  for  the  faults  one  commits  are  doubly  serious  when  they  fall  back  on 
the  work  one  is  directing.  The  heads  of  pious  associations  ought  to  be  saints, 
in  order  to  draw  down  upon  them  the  blessing  of  God.  I  often  ask  myself 
how  I  dare,  I  so  bad  and  so  weak,  remain  the  representative  of  so  many  ex- 
cellent young  men.  This  is  why  I  long  for  the  moment  when  it  will  be  possi- 
ble for  me  to  resign  the  presidentship. 

"  We  are  reading  at  present  at  our  meetings  the  fife  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul, 
in  order  better  to  penetrate  ourselves  with  his  maxims  and  traditions.  A  pa- 
tron saint  should  not  be  a  signboard  to  a  society,  like  a  St,  Denis  or  St. 


114  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

Nicholas  over  the  door  of  a  tavern.  It  is  a  type  tliat  we  sliould  strive  to  real- 
ize, as  he  himself  reaHzed  the  Divine  type,  wliich  is  Jesus  Christ.  It  is  a  life 
that  we  must  continue,  a  heart  where  we  must  seek  to  warm  our  hearts,  an  in- 
telligence to  which  we  must  come  for  light ;  it  is  a  model  for  us  on  earth,  and 
a  protector  in  heaven  ;  we  owe  hun  consequently  the  twofold  homage  of  imi- 
tation and  invocation.  It  is  only  on  this  condition  of  appropriating  the 
thoughts  and  virtues  of  the  saint  that  the  Society  can  escape  from  the  personal 
imperfections  of  its  members,  and,  by  rendering  itself  useful  to  the  Church, 
justify  its  existence." 

In  drawing  up  the  rules  of  the  confraternity  no  provision 
had  been  made  for  prayers  and  other  charitable  offices  in  be- 
half of  those  who  might  be  called  away.  It  was  not  long, 
however,  before  this  oversight,  natural  enough  in  the  young, 
met  with  a  sad  and  stern  rebuke  in  the  death  of  some  of  the 
youngest  of  the  little  brotherhood. 

Ozanam  was  the  first  to  think  of  repairing  the  omission, 
and  suggested  that  every  year,  on  the  first  Monday  of  Lent, 
a  Requiem  Mass  should  be  celebrated  for  the  deceased  mem- 
bers, all  the  associates  assisting,  that  by  this  means  they 
might  still  maintain  unbroken  the  bonds  of  charity  whicli  had 
united  them  on  earth. 

He  attached  great  importance  to  a  correspondence  being 
regularly  kept  up  between  the  various  conferences,  and  gently 
upbraids  Lallier,  who  was  in  Paris,  for  growing  remiss  in  this 
respect.  These  sort  of  epistles  were  heard  with  attention, 
and  often  bore  good  practical  fruits.  "  You  are  therefore 
earnestly  entreated  to  resume  a  correspondence  which  had 
about  it  something  of  the  apostolic  times,  and  which  you 
have,  I  suspect,  suspended  simply  because  of  that  too  great 
modesty  against  which  I  wage  war  so  pitilessly."  "You 
can  form  no  idea,"  he  urges  elsewhere,  "  of  the  magic  there 
is  in  words  that  come  from  a  distance.  Your  letter  has  re- 
vived the  ardor  of  the  work  among  the  soldiers,  which  was 
beginning  to  languish.  The  links  that  bind  us  to  the  Society 
of  Paris  are  like  those  which  united  those  celebrated  twins 
whose  separation  caused  their  death  ;  life  and  blood  circulate 
interiorly." 

He  believed  much  in  this  power  of  association  for  good, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  115 

and  referred  to  it  continually  as  the   most  efifectual  counter- 
poise to  the  fatal  strength  of  union  amongst  the  wicked. 

/  "Alas  I"  he  exclaims,  *'  we  see  the  division  which  exists  in  society  g^rowing 
deeper  and  wider  every  day.  It  is  not  political  opinions  that  divide  men  ;  it 
is  something  less  than  opinions  ;  it  is  their  interests  that  sunder  them.  Here 
is  the  camp  of  the  rich,  there  the  camp  of  the  poor.  One  only  means  of  sal- 
vation remains  to  us — that  is,  that  Christians,  in  the  name  of  love,  interpose 
between  the  two  camps,  passing  like  beneficent  deserters  from  one  to  the 
other,  collecting  abundant  alms  from  the  rich,  and  resignation  from  the  poor  ; 
carrying  gifts  to  the  poor,  and  words  of  gratitude  to  the  rich  ;  teaching  them 
on  both  sides  to  look  upon  each  other  as  brothers  ;  and  communicating  mutu- 
al charity  to  all,  until  this  charity,  paralyzing  and  stifling  the  egotism  of  both 
parties,  and  every  day  lessening  their  antipathies,  shall  bid  the  two  camps 
arise  and  break  down  the  barriers  of  prejudice,  and  cast  aside  their  weapons 
of  anger,  and  march  forth  to  meet  each  other— not  to  fight,  but  to  mingle  to- 
gether in  one  embrace,  so  that  they  may  henceforth  form  but  one  fold  under 
one  pastor  y«««wi  ovile,  unus pastor ^^ 

His  faith  in  the  power  of  friendship  was  indeed  as  strong 
as  his  personal  delight  in  it  was  boundless.  "  Friendships," 
he  says,  "  formed  under  the  auspices  of  faith,  in  a  double 
confraternity  of  religious  discussions  and  charitabje  deeds,  far 
from  growing  cold  by  absence,  draw  closer,  and  become  as 
it  were  more  concentrated.  They  live  in  memory,  and  mem- 
ory beautifies  all  things,  idealizes  all  realities,  purifies  every 
image,  and  retains  the  pleasant  far  more  vividly  than  the 
painful  ones." 


CHAPTER  XIII. 
1839. 

The  position  which  Ozanam  had  waited  for  so  long  and 
anxiously  did  not  bring  him  the  peace  of  mind  he  had  ex- 
pected. His  chief  motive  in  coveting  it  was  the  power  it 
would  give  him  of  surrounding  his  mother's  declining  years 
with  greater  comforts;  and  this  privilege,  now  that  he  had 
gained  it,  seemed  likely  to  be  of  short  duration.  Madame 
Ozanam's  health  had  reached  that  point  when  all  that  could 
be  hoped  for  was  that  the  end,  which  was  swiftly  drawing 
near,  might  be  peaceful,  and  free  from  unendurable  suffer- 
ing. 

As  regarded  Frederic  himself,  he  had  confidently  looked 
to  his  nomination  as  to  an  event  which  would  set  at  rest  for 
ever  all  doubts  as  to  his  vocation,  believing  that  henceforth 
he  would  feel  perfectly  reassured  as  to  his  appointed  work. 
Here,  too,  he  was  deceived,  this  disappointment  being,  in- 
deed, a  natural  consequence  of  the  former  one.  Since  his 
mother's  death  was  likely  to  set  him  free  so  soon,  and  to  re- 
move all  necessity  for  his  continuing  in  a  worldly  career,  had 
he  done  wisely  in  trammeUing  himself  with  fresh  responsibili- 
ties and  ties  ?  Might  he  not  have  thereby  set  up  a  barrier  be- 
tween him  and  his  true  vocation — the  priesthood  ?  There 
was  nothing,  except  his  present  duty  to  his  mother,  to  indi- 
cate that  he  was  not  called  to  the  sacerdotal  life,  and  there 
were  many  inward  voices,  attractions,  aptitudes,  antipathies, 
which  whispered  to  him  sometimes  loudly,  sometimes  more 
faintly,  that  he  was.  His  ardent  desire  to  serve  the  cause  of 
truth,  to  do  something  for  God  and  humanity,  to  lead  a  life 
of  self-forgetfulness,  labor,  and  sacrifice,  was  as  strong  as  ever, 
while  his  repugnance  to  marriage  continued  insurmountable. 

S16 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  117 

A  letter  written  to  a  friend  who  consulted  him  on  the  subject 
of  his  own  intended  marriage  gives  a  clear  idea  of  what  his 
views  were  at  this  period.  He  was  now  six-and-twenty  years 
of  age : 

"...  I  am  greatly  touched  by  your  confidence.  There  is  no  more  severe 
trial  than  this  uncertainty  concerning  a  question  on  which  one's  whole  life  de- 
pends, and  in  these  circumstances  the  full  and  complete  acceptance  of  the  Di- 
vine will  must  be  most  meritorious.  You  are  too  deeply  imbued  with  this  be- 
lief for  your  decision,  whatever  way  it  may  be,  not  to  turn  out  for  your  happi- 
ness and  your  salvation.  But  I  cling  to  the  hope  of  seeing  you  preserve  your 
liberty  a  little  longer  ;  of  seeing  you  wait  a  little  before  contracting  new  duties 
which  would  enchain  you  completely  and  leave  you  no  time  for  study  or  for 
action.  The  solitary  life  you  are  leading  just  now  is  no  doubt  sad  and  dreary  ; 
but  work  can  fill  it  up,  and  religion  can  console  it.  God  and  science,  cliarity 
and  study,  are  not  these  enough  to  charm  your  youth  ?  And  then,  if  I  may 
say  out  all  I  think,  is  virginity  a  virtue  fit  only  for  the  daughters  of  Eve  ? 
Was  it  not,  on  the  contrary,  one  of  the  principal  glories  of  our  Redeemer  ? 
Was  not  this  what  He  cherished  above  all  in  His  beloved  disciple  ?  Is  it  not  the 
fairest  flower  that  is  cultivated  in  the  garden  of  the  Church  ?  Do  you  feel  no  re- 
gret in  letting  it  wither  before  the  hour  of  noon  ?  Would  you  not  be  glad  to  take 
it  with  you  to  heaven,  were  you  called  away  during  those  perilous  years  which 
precede  perfect  maturity  ?  Does  not  the  day  after  a  marriage  always  bring 
you  a  kind  of  pang  ?  Believe  me,  a  man  abdicates  a  great  part  of  his  dignity 
the  day  that  he  chains  himself  to  a  woman's  arm.  Read  over  St.  Paul.  Do 
not  imagine  from  this  that  I  am  an  advocate  for  eternal  and  universal  celi- 
bacy. Heaven  forbid  1  But  I  should  like  men  to  postpone  marriage  to  the 
time  when  it  has  become  necessary,  and  therefore  ceases  to  be  fatal ;  to  the 
period  when  the  mind  has  reached  its  development,  when  the  will  has  acquir- 
ed all  its  energy,  and  when  one  is  committed  by  one's  work,  one's  engage- 
meiits,  one's  antecedents  of  any  sort,  so  as  no  longer  to  be  able  to  disengage 
one's  self ;  until  one  has  gained  some  right  to  the  joys  of  domestic  life  by 
work  and  solitude;  when  one  has  something  to  offer,  and  not  everything  to 
receive  ;  to  that  period,  in  a  word,  when  a  man  is  sure  of  being  his  own  mas- 
ter, and  free  externally. 

"You  speak  of  the  sweets  of  family  life  ;  but,  my  dear  friend,  is  it  quite 
opportune,  this  material  or  sentimental  well-being,  this  twofold  egotism  ?  Is 
society  so  happy,  is  religion  so  honored,  is  our  Christian  youth  so  numerous 
and  so  active,  are  the  few  who  can  work  for  the  general  good  so  full  of  lei- 
sure, as  that  you,  to  whom  God  has  given  such  ability,  who  are  surrounded  by 
acquaintances  and  encouragements,  and  who  are  conscious  of  an  inner  voice 
calling  you  to  work,  should  feel  justified  in  withdrawing  from  the  field  like  a 
tired  laborer  who  has  borne  the  heat  and  burden  of  the  day  ?  Were  you  not 
in  earnest,  after  all,  in  what  you  have  said  and-<lone  and  written,  and  in  what 
your  friends  have  repeated  and  striven  for  with  you  ?  Do  you  despair  of  the 
regeneration  of  the  countr)',  and  the  amendment  of  ideas  ?    Or  is  it  that  you 


ii8  '  lAfe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

despair  of  j'ourself — that  is  to  say,  of  God,  who  created,  redeemed,  and  sancti* 
fied  you  ?  You  say,  forsooth,  that  it  is  so  hard  to  find  out  your  post  here  be- 
low !  May  we  not  all  say  the  same  thing  ?  And  is  this  a  reason  for  commit- 
ting suicide  ?  and  is  it  not  suicide  for  you,  being  what  you  are,  to  go  off  to 
X.  to  sow  turnips  ? 

"  I  entreat  you,  go  and  see  Montalembert,  or  rather  ask  him  where  he  is  to 
be  found.  I  have  reason  to  think  that  he  could  suggest  to  you  many  projects 
capable  of  occupying  your  mind,  and  diverting  you  from  your  present  intel- 
lectual idleness." 

This  period,  which  outwardly  seemed  one  of  calm  and  defi- 
nite appointment,  was  in  reality  the  most  agitated  of  Ozanam's 
life.  The  municipality  of  Lyons  had  just  created  a  professor- 
ship expressly  for  him,  and  he  was  pursued  on  all  sides  by 
the  most  seductive  offers.  M.  Cousin  did  not  disguise  his 
hope  of  ultimately  luring  him  into  '^  his  regiment,"  as  he  call- 
ed the  school  of  philosophy  ;  the  leaders  of  the  Catholic  party 
were  appealing  to  him  for  articles  in  the  various  periodicals 
and  newspapers ;  M.  de  Montalembert,  who  was  just  then 
founding  one,  writes  to  him  :  "  I  implore  of  you,  give  us 
a  few  fragments  of  your  work,  a  few  splinters  of  the  monu- 
ment that  you  are  chiselling ;  I  ask  this  service  as  of  a  friend 
and  brother-in-arms,  on  whose  sympathy  I  can  count,  as  you 
must  always  count  on  mine." 

If  these  encouraging  invitations  had  come  a  year  sooner, 
Ozanam  would  have  hailed  them  with  gratitude  and  delight ; 
but  with  the  threat  of  his  mother's  death  before  his  eyes,  and 
his  own  consequent  emancipation  from  the  duties  which 
bound  him  to  his  present  career,  they  were  only  a  source  of 
pain  and  perplexity. 

He  had  watched  with  intense  interest  the  Abb6  Lacordaire's 
scheme  for  the  reintroduction  of  the  illustrious  order  of  St. 
Dominic  into  France,  which  was  now  on  the  eve  of  its  ac- 
complishment. Affection  for  Lacordaire  himself,  admiration 
for  his  genius  and  holiness,  and,  at  the  same  time,  a  sort  of 
personal  pride  in  him  as  a  Caiholic  and  a  brother-in-arms,  all 
tended  to  draw  Ozanam's  sympathies  strongly  in  the  direction 
of  the  order  which  had  once  shed  such  lustre  on  the  Church 
of  France,     No  dpubt  Lacordair^  saw  this,  an<^  jt  was  nat- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanatn.  119 

ural  that  he  should  endeavor  to  follow  up  the  advantage. 
There  is  no  power  so  terrible  on  the  battle-field  as  a  virgin 
heart;  it  was  this  that  made  trained  warriors  tremble  before 
the  frail  Maid  of  Orleans,  and  the  poet  expressed  one  of  the 
deepest  truths  of  Christian  life  when  he  sang  of  King  Arthur's 
blameless  knights,  "  Their  strength  was  as  the  strength  often, 
because  their  hearts  were  pure."  No  one  understood  this 
truth  better  than  Lacordaire,  and  it  is  not  to  be  wondered 
that  he  should  have  been  lovingly  and  longingly  bent  upon 
the  conquest  of  Ozanam's  strong,  pure  heart,  and  that,  when 
the  grave  had  closed  over  his  friend,  he  should  have  alluded 
to  his  failure  in  capturing  the  prize  with  a  sense  of  disappoint- 
ment, mingled  with  a  tenderly  implied  though  unmerited  re- 
proach. 

"  On  Thursday,  the  7th  of  March  (1839) — feast  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas — we 
leave  Paris,"  he  wrote  to  Ozanam  ;  *'  we  shall  be  at  Lyons  on  the  loth,  and 
on  the  i2th  we  embark  for  Milan.  I  shall  be  so  delighted  to  see  you  and  all 
our  friends,  and  I  expect  that  you  will  help  us  to  perform  the  pilgrimage  which 
no  good  Catholic  omits  at  Lyons." 

Ozanam  prepared  a  welcome  for  his  illustrious  friend  by 
convoking  the  various  conferences  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  to 
meet  him,  and  hear  once  more  that  eloquent  voice  which  had 
so  endeared  itself  to  the  Catholic  youth  of  France.  It  was  a 
solemn  and  tender  meeting.  Lacordaire  himself  was  deeply 
moved,  and  his  emotion  inspired  him  with  one  of  those  sud- 
den, soul-stirring  bursts  of  eloquence  which  a  large  gathering 
of  souls  seldom  failed  to  call  forth  from  him.  He  spoke  with 
great  simplicity;  he  told  them  the  story  of  his  present  mission, 
the  long  efforts  that  had  preceded  its  approaching  fulfilment  j 
he  explained,  with  the  familiarity  of  a  brother  speaking  to 
brothers,  the  aim  and  object  of  his  work,  which  had  been  so 
often  misunderstood  and  falsely  interpreted;  he  told  them  all 
about  St.  Dominic  and  the  special  apostolate  of  the  Preach- 
ing Friars,  whose  rule  he  was  going  to  embrace;  he  dwelt 
much  on  the  necessity  of  recalling  religious  orders  to  France; 
and  concluded  by  speaking  in  terms  of  the  warmest  affection 


120  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

of  the  members  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  and 
asking  them  to  pray  for  him  and  his  two  companions.  These 
young  men,  it  was  said,  had  been  drawn  from  the  dark  haunts 
of  the  Carbonari  by  Lacordaire's  siren  voice.  Everything 
conduced  to  render  the  scene  impressive :  the  numerous  as- 
sembly of  young  men,  whose  faith  was  in  enthusiastic  sympa- 
thy with  that  of  the  young  priest  going  forth  from  their  midst, 
sacrificing  a  career  already  illuminated  with  the  purest  glory, 
in  order  to  devote  himself  to  a  life  of  austere  labor,  of  pover- 
ty and  suffering,  voluntarily  chosen.  It  was  a  spectacle  cal- 
culated to  move,  by  a  sudden  and  irresistible  impulse,  the 
whole  course  of  a  life  in  those  who  witnessed  it.  There  were 
many  present  who  never  afterwards  lost  the  impression  of 
that  hour,  and  there  were  few  dry  eyes  in  the  assembly  when 
the  Abb6  Lacordaire  and  his  two  fellow-pilgrims  passed  out 
of  it. 

It  will  readily  be  imagined  that  Ozanam  was  not  one  of  the 
most  indifferent  amongst  the  spectators. 

Soon  after  his  arrival  in  Rome,  P^re  Lacordaire  wrote  to 
him,  giving  an  account  of  his  journey,  his  arrival  at  the  Domi- 
nican convent,  the  affectionate  welcome  he  and  his  companions 
had  met  with  from  their  Italian  brethren,  and  his  own  recep- 
tion into  the  order — a  pleasant,  friendly  letter,  full  of  spon- 
taneous information  about  himself  and  his  happiness  in  his  new 
vocation,  but  not  containing  an  allusion,  direct  or  indirect,  to 
the  possibility  of  this  vocation  being  shared  by  his  correspon- 
dent. If  the  reticence  was  calculated  with  a  view  to  eliciting 
responsive  confidence,  the  strategy  succeeded  perfectly,  as 
the  following  extract  from  Ozanam's  reply  proves : 

**  Issto^^y  August  26, 1839. 
** .  .  .  When  your  letter  from  La  Querela  came  to  inform  me  of  the  happy 
termination  of  your  pilgrimage,  the  welcome  given  you  by  the  family  of  St. 
Dominic,  and  the  souvenir  w^hich,  in  the  midst  of  so  many  absorbing  interests, 
you  retained  of  the  members  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  I  hesitated  long  betw^een 
the  desire  to  express  to  you  my  gratitude'  for  this  unexpected  honor,  and  my 
fear  of  intruding  inopportunely  upon  the  laborious  solitude  of  your  novitiate. 
But,  in  a  recent  journey  to  Paris,  I  learned  that  your  friends  had  not  given  up 


Life  atid  Works  of  Frederic  Otananu  121 

corresponding  with  you  ;  and  since  you  condescend  to  give  me  this  title,  I  feel 
at  liberty  to  avail  myself  of  its  privileges.  It  is  so  short  a  time  since  you  left 
the  great  capital  yourself  that  the  impressions  of  a  traveller  of  yesterday  can 
be  of  little  interest  to  you.  There  is  no  need  to  tell  you,  what  you  know  al- 
ready so  well,  that  the  movement  to  which  you  gave  such  a  powerful  impulse 
from  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame  has  not  ceased  to  spread  amongst  the  intelli- 
gent classes.  I  have  seen  with  my  own  eyes  republican  Carbonari  changed 
into  humble  believers,  young  artists  with  fiery  passions  asking  for  the  rules  of 
the  Confraternity.  I  recognized  the  disorganization,  the  discredit  of  the  ra- 
tionalistic school,  which  has  rendered  it  powerless,  and  compelled  its  two 
principal  organs,  the  Revue  Fratigatse  and  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes.  to 
beg  for  the  collaboration  of  Catholics,  or,  as  M.  de  Bulos  says,  of  honnStes 
gens.  Meantime  M.  de  Montalembert  has  succeeded  in  forming,  in  the  Cham- 
ber of  Peers,  a  phalanx  ready  to  fight  for  ihe  good  cause  ;  and  M.  de  Cam6 
affirms  that  in  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  fifty  votes  will  soon  be  forthcoming 
in  favor  of  the  religious  questions  :  on  the  other  hand  the  little  Society  of  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul  sees  its  ranks  growing  with  astonishing  rapidity.  A  new 
conference  has  been  formed  of  students  from  the  Ecole  Normale  and  the  Poly- 
technique  ;  fifteen  young  men,  forming  about  a  third  of  the  seminary  of  the 
University,  have  asked  as  a  favor  to  spend  two  hours  every  Sunday,  their  only 
day  of  liberty,  in  working  for  God  and  the  poor.  Next  year  Paris  will  count 
fourteen  conferences,  and  we  shall  have  a  like  number  in  the  provinces  ;  alV 
this  represents  a  total  of  more  than  one  thousand  Catholics  impatient  to  join 
in  the  intellectual  crusade  which  you  will  preach.  .  .  . 

'•Meantime  I,  the  humble  witness  of  those  things  so  full  of  hope,  am  now 
probably  settled  for  some  time  to  come  in  a  position  which  I  had  long  desired, 
that  of  Professor  of  Commercial  Law.  I  am  thankful  for  a  post  which  fixes 
me  near  my  mother,  now  old  and  infirm,  and  which  does  not  at  the  same 
time  tear  me  from  ray  taste — unlucky,  no  doubt,  but  incurable — for  literary 
and  philosophical  work.  ...  I  feel  just  at  present  more  than  ever  the  need 
of  a  spiritual  direction,  which  would  supplement  my  weakness  and  deliver  me 
from  my  own  responsibility.  To  speak  quite  openly,  I  have  felt  more  than 
once,  in  presence  of  the  illness  of  my  mother,  which  is  making  such  fearful 
progress,  and  when  the  possibility  of  that  awful  loss  has  come  upon  me,  that 
there  is  no  reason  why  I  should  retain  a  position  which  filial  duty  alone  led 
me  to  seek ;  and  then  uncertainty  as  to  my  vocation  comes  back  with  greater 
anxiety  than  ever.  I  commend  to  your  charitable  prayers  this  interior  trial, 
from  which  I  have  long  suffered  ;  for,  if  God  deigned  to  call  me  to  His  ser- 
vice, there  is  no  army  in  which  I  would  more  gladly  serve  than  that  in  which 
you  are  enrolled.  I  should  even  be  glad  to  know  something  of  its  conditions 
beforehand,  so  that,  with  the  help  of  my  confessor,  I  might  come  to  some  de- 
termination. The  Rule  of  the  Preaching  Friars  does  not  figure  in  our  libra- 
ry ;  can  you  tell  me  where  it  is  to  be  found  ?  You  would  thereby  add  one 
more  obligation  to  the  many  which  I  already  owe  you." 

P^re  Lacordaire  did  not  leave  this  letter  long  unanswered. 
After  touching  on  the  manifestations  of  a  change  in  public 


122  Lije  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

feeling,  which  Ozanam  alluded  to  in   his  opening  lines,  he 
goes  on  to  say : 

"...  We  shall  see  greater  things  than  these.  Do  we  not  already  see 
Don  Carlos  driven  out  of  Spain,  and  the  Revolution  mistress  of  the  country 
until  such  time  as  the  vsrind  of  the  Lord  shall  arise  over  Spain,  as  well  as 
over  France  ?  The  Revolution,  as  Mirabeau  said,  will  go  the  round  of  the 
world,  but  with  the  Catholic  Church  behind  it.  You  must  know,  my  dear 
friend — for,  in  truth,  I  entertain  this  feeling  towards  you — you  must  know 
that  in  a  book  which  was  printed  at  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
if  not  earlier,  and  which  treats  of  the  life  of  a  certain  Madame  d'Escobar,  it  is 
said  that  she  had  a  vision  where  she  beheld,  at  the  same  time,  England  being 
converted  while  Spain  was  being  perverted.  It  was  the  same  saint  who  fore^ 
told  that  one  day  the  orders  of  St.  Dominic  and  St.  Ignatius  would  be  per- 
fectly reconciled  and  united. 

"  I  saw  in  the  Univers,  which  we  take  in,  that  your  Dante  has  been  reprint- 
ed ;  I  am  glad  of  it.  You  must  on  no  account  lay  aside  your  pen.  Writing 
is  a  hard  trade,  no  doubt,  but  the  press  has  become  too  powerful  for  us  to  de- 
sert our  post  there.  Let  us  write,  not  for  glory,  not  for  immortality,  but  for 
Jesus  Christ.  Let  us  crucify  ourselves  to  our  pen.  If  nobody  should  read  us 
in  a  hundred  years  hence,  what  does  that  signify  ?  The  drop  of  water  that 
falls  into  the  sea  has  gone  to  swell  the  fiood,  and  the  flood  never  dies.  *  He 
who  has  been  of  his  time^  says  Schiller,  '  has  been  of  all  time.*  He  has  done 
his  work,  he  has  had  his  share  in  the  creation  of  things  which  are  eternal. 
How  many  books  there  are  now  forgotten  on  the  shelves  of  our  libraries  that 
contributed  three  hundred  years  ago  to  bring  about  the  revolution  which  we 
are  witnessing  1  Our  fathers  themselves  are  unknown  to  us,  but  we  live  by 
them.  Moreover,  nothing  that  you  have  written  should  dishearten  your  pen. 
You  have  a  nervous,  brilliant  style,  and  solid  erudition.  I  advise  you  strong- 
ly to  go  on  working,  and,  if  I  were  the  director  of  your  conscience, I  would  lay 
it  on  you  as  an  obligation. 

'*  The  close  of  your  letter,  where  you  tell  me  of  the  persevering  instincts  that 
impel  you  to  the  service  of  God,  touch  me  deeply.  The  hope  of  seeing  you 
some  day  one  of  ours  is  dear  to  me.  I  don't  know  where  you  could  find  our 
rule.  A  Paris  publisher  ought  to  be  able  to  procure  it  for  you.  But  even 
then  I  doubt  whether  you  would  be  able  to  disentangle  clearly  the  mechanism 
of  our  order.  I  think  a  few  words  would  explain  it  to  you  more  satisfactorily. 
The  end  is  preaching  and  the  Divine  science  ;  the  means  are  prayer^  mortifi- 
cation of  the  senses^  and  study.  The  prayer  consists  in  psalmody,  or  rather 
the  recital  of  the  Canonical  Office,  which  takes  us  about  two  hours  and  a  half 
every  day.  We  only  sing  Compline,  except  on  great  feast-days,  when  we  sing 
Tierce  and  Vespers  also.  The  mortification  consists  in  perpetual  abstinence, 
with  fasting  every  Friday,  and  from  the  14///  of  September  to  Easter,  But 
this  mortification  being  only  a  means  to  an  end,  the  Superior  can  dispense 
from  it  when  necessary.  So  also  with  the  woollen  shirt,  from  which  one  can 
be  dispensed  in  case  of  its  causing  serious  suffering.  We  have  no  extraordi- 
nary penance,  and  no  one  oeed  practise  any,  except  they  feel  the  want  of  it, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  123 

and  then  with  the  advice  of  his  director.  We  have  eight  or  nine  hours  a  day 
for  study,  and  we  may  be  exempted  from  choir  in  certain  cases,  which  increas- 
es this  time.  The  real  novices,  that  is,  those  who  enter  the  order  from  eigh- 
teen to  twenty,  study  for  ten  years,  are  lodg^ed  separately,  and  only  enjoy  the 
liberty  of  the  fathers  when  they  have  reached  the  priesthood,  even  before  they 
have  completed  their  studies.  We  rise  at  five,  and  we  go  to  bed  between 
nine  and  ten.  As  to  the  government,  it  is  elective  and  admirably  free. 
Faults  against  the  rule  involve  no  sin,  unless  they  be  accompanied  by  contempt 
0/  the  rule,  or  else,  what  is  very  rare,  there  has  been  a  precept  in  virtute  obe- 
dientice.  Faults  are  punished  by  prostrations  on  the  ground  ;  formerly,  when 
they  were  grave,  they  were  liable  to  be  punished  by  the  discipline  on  the 
naked  shoulders  in  full  chapter.  The  decline  of  the  monastic  spirit  has  al- 
most entirely  done  away  with  this  custom. 

*'  These  few  words,  my  dear  friend,  will  tell  you  as  much  about  our  life  as 
it  is  possible  to  know  without  having  practised  it.  A  week  p>assed  with  us, 
when  we  shall  have  a  novitiate,  will  put  you  au  courant  better  than  ten 
volumes. 

"  As  regards  myself,  I  am  very  happy ;  I  have  nothing  to  regret  here,  ex- 
cept the  want  of  a  certain  severity,*  which  is  necessary  to  us  Frenchmen. 
When  we  become  monks,  it  is  with  the  intention  of  being  so  up  to  our  eyes. 
Here  all  is  grave,  spiritual,  mortified  even — useful;  but  one  feels  that  one  is  in 
a  country  where  calm  reigns,  at  least  on  the  surface." 

The  event  which  Ozanam  had  been  dreading  for  more 
than  a  year  came  to  pass  one  month  after  the  date  of  this  let- 
ter. It  was  sudden  at  tlie  last.  On  Christmas  eve  he  thus 
describes  the  closing  scene  in  a  letter  to  Lallier : 

"...  Alas  !  what  havoc  this  death  has  made  in  my  mind  as  well  as  in  my 
heart.  No,  I  am  wrong  ;  what  so  crushed  me  was  the  long  illness  that  I  be- 
held day  by  day  destroying  her,  and  which — shall  I  say  it  ? — seemed  as  if  it 
were  going  to  dishonor  the  sacrifice  before  consuming  it,  by  quenching  the 
intellectual  faculties  and  blunting  the  moral  feelings.  This  thought  was  horri- 
ble, and  haunted  me  constantly ;  I  seemed  to  see  her  soul  dying  with  her 
body  !  Mercifully  the  trial  was  shortened  ;  just  at  the  end  the  energy  of  her 
soul  revived,  and  Christ,  in  descending  into  the  heart  of  His  beloved  servant, 
left  there  strength  for  the  supreme  struggle.  She  remained  for  three  days 
calm,  serene,  murmuring  prayers,  or  acknowledging  our  caresses  and  services 
by  a  few  words  of  ineffable  sweetness.  At  last  the  fatal  night  came  ;  it  was  I 
who  was  watching.  I  suggested  to  my  dear  mother  the  acts  of  faith,  hope, 
and  charity,  the  same  that  she  had  taught  me  to  lisp  after  her  as  a  little 
child.  Towards  one  o'clock  new  symptoms  showed  themselves  and  frightened 
me.  I  called  my  elder  brother,  who  was  resting  in  the  next  room.  Charles 
heard  us  and  got  up ;  the  servants  hurried  in.     We  knelt  round  the  bed ; 

•  Pere  Lacordaire  subsequently  succeeded  in  establishing  the  Dominican  rule  in  France  in  its 
primitive  severity. 


124  L^f^  ^^^  Works  of  Freddric  Ozanam. 

Alphonse  said  aloud  those  heartrending  prayers,  to  which  we  answered  with 
sobs.  All  the  succors  which  religion  reserves  for  this  solemn  hour — absolu- 
tion, indulgences — were  once  more  applied.  The  memory  of  an  immaculate 
life,  of  good  works,  which,  too  numerous  and  too  fatiguing,  had  hastened  its 
end  ;  three  sons  preserved  in  the  faith  amidst  these  stormy  times,  and  united 
here  now  as  by  a  providential  coincidence  ;  added  to  this  the  hopes,  so  near 
to  us,  of  a  happy  immortality — all  this  contributed  to  lessen  the  horror  and 
lighten  the  darkness  of  death.  There  were  no  convulsions,  no  agony,  only  a 
slumber  that  left  her  countenance  almost  smiling,  a  faint  breathing  that  grew 
gradually  fainter,  until  at  last  it  ceased,  and  we  rose  up  orphans.  How  shall 
I  describe  the  desolation  that  broke  forth  then,  and  at  the  same  time  the  in- 
expressible, incomprehensible  inward  peace  that  we  all  felt,  the  sense  of  a  new 
blessedness  that,  in  spite  of  ourselves,  filled  our  hearts  to  overflowing —  not 
ours  only,  but  those  of  all  those  nearest  and  dearest  to  us  ?  Then  the  im- 
mense concourse  at  her  funeral,  the  tears  of  the  poor,  the  prayers  offered  up 
on  all  sides  spontaneously,  and  without  any  solicitation  of  ours,  and  then  all 
the  kindly  sympathy  of  friends  like  you,  who  hastened  to  condole  with  us,  and 
must  have  been  surprised  often  to  find  us  so  tranquil  in  our  great  grief. 

**  Happy  the  man  to  whom  God  gives  a  holy  mother  ! 

•*  This  dear  memory  will  never  forsake  us.  Often  in  our  solitude  now,  in 
the  midst  of  the  anguish  that  weighs  down  my  soul,  the  remembrance  of 
that  august  scene  returns  to  sustain  and  uplift  me.  I  think  of  how  short  life 
is,  how  soon  we  shall  be  reunited  with  those  from  whom  death  has  parted  us, 
and  then  I  feel  all  temptations  of  self-love,  all  the  unworthy  instincts  of  my 
nature,  fade  away,  and  my  desires  are  concentrated  in  the  single  one  of  dying 
like  my  mother. 

««Oh  !  how  I  rejoice  now  that  I  did  not  abandon  that  blessed  death-bed 
to  run  after  the  vague  promises  of  University  honors.  If  at  this  trifling  sac- 
rifice I  should  only  have  earned  the  privilege  of  passing  a  few  more  months 
near  her,  of  being  there  on  that  last  night,  I  am  more  than  paid  for  it." 

Seldom  did  the  virtues  of  the  dead  justify  more  fully  the 
tender  and  passionate  panegyric  in  which  the  first  outburst  of 
sorrow  expresses  itself.  It  was  no  wild  rhapsody  of  grief,  but 
the  result  of  his  life's  deepest  and  most  sacred  experience,  to 
which  Frederic  gave  utterance  when  he  said  of  his  mother 
that  she  had  been  '*  the  living  image  of  the  Church,  and  the 
most  perfect  revelation  of  Providence  to  her  children."  He 
continued  all  his  life  to  invoke  her  in  his  necessities,  to  con- 
sult her  in  moments  of  doubt  and  distress,  as  when  she  was 
on  earth,  and  he  believed  that  her  love  and  wisdom  were  em- 
powered to  help  him  as  of  yore.  Two  years  after  her  death 
he  writes  to  a  friend,  who  had  just  lost  his  mother : 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozviam,  125 

**  Nothing  is  so  appalling  as  the  growing  sohtude,  the  void  that  death  creates 
around  us.  I  have  gone  through  it  all ;  but  this  state  did  not  last  long. 
There  followed  quickly  another,  when  I  began  to  feel  that  I  was  not  alone, 
when  I  was  conscious  of  something  infinitely  sweet  in  the  depths  of  my  soul. 
It  was  like  an  assurance  that  I  had  not  been  left  alone  ;  it  was  a  benign, 
though  invisible,  neighborhood;  it  was  as  if  a  cherished  soul,  passing 
close  by,  touched  me  with  its  wings.  And  just  as  formerly  I  used  to 
recognize  the  step,  the  voice,  the  breath  of  my  mother,  so  now  when  a  fresh 
breeze  revived  my  strength,  when  a  virtuous  thought  entered  my  mind, 
when  a  salutary  impulse  stirred  my  will,  I  could  not  but  think  it  was  still  my 
mother.  After  a  lapse  of  two  years,  when  time  might  have  dispelled  what 
was  merely  the  effect  of  an  overwrought  imagination,  I  still  experience  the 
same  thing.  There  are  moments  when  a  sudden  thrill  passes  through  me,  as 
if  she  were  there  by  my  side  ;  above  all,  when  I  most  stand  in  need  of  it, 
there  are  hours  of  maternal  and  filial  intercourse,  and  then  1  shed  more  abun- 
dant tears,  perhaps,  than  in  the  first  months  of  my  bereavement,  but  an  inef- 
fable peace  is  mingled  with  their  sadness.  When  I  am  good,  when  I  have 
done  anything  for  the  poor,  whom  she  loved  so  tenderly,  when  I  am  at  peace 
with  God,  whom  she  served  so  well,  I  see  her  smiling  on  me  in  the  distance. 
Sometimes,  when  I  am  praying,  I  fancy  I  hear  her  voice  praying  with  me,  as 
we  used  to  do  together  at  the  foot  of  the  crucifix  every  night.  Often,  in  fact 
— this  I  would  not  breathe  to  any  one,  but  I  confide  it  to  you — when  I  have 
the  happiness  of  communicating,  when  our  Saviour  comes  to  visit  me,  it  is  as 
if  she  followed  Him  into  my  wretched  heart,  as  many  a  time  she  followed 
Him  when  He  was  borne  in  Viaticum  to  the  dwellings  of  the  poor  ;  and  then 
J  believe  firmly  in  the  real  presence  o/my  mother  near  «*," 


CHAPTER  XIV. 
1840-41. 

The  Cours  de  Droits  for  which  Ozanam  had  so  longed  for 
his  mother's  sake,  was  not  inaugurated  until  after  her  death. 
His  opening  speech  made  a  sensation,  and  at  once  attracted 
crowds  to  the  lectures.  "  The  crowd  was  very  great,"  he 
says  to  his  cousin  Pessonneaux,  "  and  ever  since  the  hall  has 
been  equally  well  attended.  It  holds  more  than  two  hundred 
and  fifty  persons.  I  permitted  myself,  nevertheless,  all  sorts 
of  philosophical  and  historical  digressions ;  I  did  not  even 
shrink  from  enunciating  severe  truths,  while  at  the  same  time 
I  seized  any  available  opportunity  of  raising  a  smile  on  the 
countenances  of  my  hearers,  and  so,  as  De  Maistre  says,  the 
needle  made  the  thread  pass.  The  rector  is  enchanted  at 
this  success,  and  is  vigorously  pushing  on  my  nomination  in 
Quinet's  place." 

These  lectures  lasted  but  one  scholastic  year.  They  have 
been  published  by  M.  Foisset  from  the  notes  left  by  Ozanam. 
In  an  introductory  notice,  M.  Foisset,  himself  a  distinguished 
judge  and  jurist,  observes  that  *'  those  who  did  not  know 
Ozanam  as  a  jurist  did  not  know  him  fully.  .  .  .  Law  was 
for  him  not  merely  what  makes  a  good  practitioner  at  the 
Courts ;  it  was  not  the  bare  application  of  judicial  texts  to  the 
business  of  daily  life.  Law  was  for  him,  above  all,  a  branch 
of  philosophy ;  it  was  a  portion  of  history  ;  it  was  even  one 
side  of  literature.  When  a  municipal  chair  of  law  was  creat- 
ed for  him  in  his  native  town,  he  took  possession  of  it,  at  the 
age  of  six-and-twenty,  armed  at  all  points  on  philosophy  as 
on  history,  and  on  the  positive  theory  of  that  portion  of  sci- 
ence which  he  was  charged   to   teach.     Deeply   penetrated 

xai 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  127 

with  the  true  mission  of  the  Professor,  he  did  not  aim  at  ac- 
cumulating in  his  lecture  subtle  judicial  problems ;  he  did  not 
lose  himself  in  endless  discussions  on  contested  points.  He 
preferred  teaching  principles  to  doubts,  inculcating  rules  of 
law,  and  clearly  demonstrating  their  wisdom,  instead  of  initiat- 
ing his  hearers,  as  he  said  himself, '  in  the  twofold  scandal  of  the 
obscurity  of  laws  and  the  contradictoriness  of  judgments.' "  * 
These  external  compensations  could  not,  however,  fill  up 
the  blank  which  death  had  made  in  his  life.  His  two  broth- 
ers were  absent,  one  on  the  mission,  the  other  finishing 
his  studies,  and  Ozanam,  on  coming  home  after  his  day  s 
work,  found  no  society  by  the  once  happy  fireside  but  that  of 
the  devoted  old  Gui-gui.  It  was  natural  enough  that  doubts 
about  his  vocation,  for  a  moment  laid  to  rest,  should  now  re- 
turn stronger  and  more  perplexing  than  ever.  It  seemed  an 
aimless  life,  with  no  object  but  a  personal  career  in  view,  dis- 
coursing a  couple  of  hours  a  week  at  his  class,  poring  over 
books  with  no  very  definite  result,  and  only  his  labors  amongst 
the  poor  to  vivify  the  dry,  commonplace  routine.  He  felt  all 
the  old  repugnance  for  the  married  state,  and  endeavored  to 
dissuade  nis  friends  from  embarking  in  it  when  they  asked  his 
opinion.  Loneliness  and  recent  sorrow  had  so  detached 
him  from  life,  and  made  him  so  realize  its  brevity  and  vanity, 
that  he  shrank  with  a  kind  of  horror  from  the  thought  of  forg- 
ing new  chains  which  would  bind  him  to  it  again.  "  In 
these  arduous  times,"  he  says,  "  the  ordinary  engagements  of 
marriage  and  paternity  cannot  suffice  to  generous  souls,  and 
outside  the  domestic  sanctuary  they  continue  to  seek  strength 
for  the  fight  through  associations  of  another  kind.  ...  As 
for  myself,  I  look  on  without  arriere-pensee^  determined  as  I 
am  not  to  occupy  myself  with  the  project  of  a  state  of  life  be- 
fore the  end  of  the  next  vacation.  I  owe  at  least  one  year's 
mourning  to  the  memory  of  my  poor  mother.  I  shall  mean- 
time be  able  to  see  the  Abb^  Lacordaire  on  his  return  from 


•  Foissct,  Preface  aux  Notts  cTun  Court  de  Droit.    CEuvrcs  completes  d'Ozanam,  vol.  viii.  p. 


128  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam. 

Rome,  and  to  assure  myself  whether  Divine  Providence  may 
not  be  willing  to  open  to  me  the  doors  of  the  order  of  St.  Do- 
minic. Between  this  and  then  I  shall  strive  to  win  some  lit- 
tle claim  to  fuller  lights  from  above,  by  acquiring  more  aus- 
tere habits  and  greater  control  over  my  passions,  that  thus  I 
may  have  more  certainty  of  being  actuated  by  the  right  in- 
spiration. I  invite  all  my  friends  to  help  me  with  their  pray- 
ers in  these  grave  and  decisive  circumstances." 

Yet  it  seems  to  us,  as  we  watch  the  tenderness  of  his  na- 
ture unconsciously  revealing  itself,  that  a  friendly  heart,  near 
enough  to  his  to  hear  its  throbbings,  could  scarcely  fail  to  re- 
cognize certain  premonitory  symptoms  which  might  fairly  be  in- 
terpreted as  signs  of  the  future  vocation.  There  is  no  ascetic 
note  in  the  following  joyous  sympathy  with  the  happiness  of 
a  young  father : 

"...  And  so  we  are  really  to  salute  you  in  sober  earnest  by  that  title  of  *  fa- 
ther, '  which  we  gave  you  in  the  old  days  as  a  merry  nickname  !  Has  God  given 
you  the  unspeakable  consolation  of  seeing  your  youth  come  to  life  again  un- 
der the  features  of  childhood  in  the  person  of  your  own  son  ?  Happy  the  first- 
born of  an  early  marriage  1  He  will  enjoy  his  parents  in  their  green  season  ; 
he  will  not  see  them  growing  gray  until  he  has  reached  maturity  himself  and 
the  farewell  of  death  will  be  only  the  signal  of  an  approaching  rendezvous  ; 
and  you,  too,  will  have  had  time  to  see  your  work  accomplished.  ...  If  the 
responsibilities  of  paternity  alarm  you,  the  hour  is  yet  distant  when  they  will 
be  difficult,  and  meanwhile  it  is  not  a  burden  that  God  has  given  you,  but  a 
little  angel,  whose  presence  will  sanctify  your  hearth,  making  virtue  appear 
more  lovely,  and  the  path  of  life  brighter.  .  .  . 

*'  We,  on  our  side,  are  doing  our  best  to  keep  alive  that  sacred  fire  of  chari- 
ty that  you  helped  us  to  light.  The  little  fire  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  lives  and 
grows.  The  extraordinary  demands  of  this  winter  revived  our  zeal.  We  are 
makingsomeprogressin  the  art  of  plundering  the  rich  in  behalf  of  the  poor.  .  .  . 
But  how  little  all  this  is,  my  dear  friend,  in  presence  of  a  population  of  sixty 
thousand  workmen,  demoralized  by  indigence  and  by  the  propagation  of  evil 
doctrines  F  Freemasonry  and  socialism  trade  upon  the  misery  and  the  angry 
passions  of  these  suffering  multitudes,  and  God  alone  knows  what  a  future  is 
in  store  for  us  if  Catholic  charity  does  not  interpose  in  time  to  arrest  the  •  ser- 
vile war '  that  is  at  her  gates ! 

"  Unhappily  our  ranks  have  more  than  one  vacant  place  to  show.  There 
have  been  several  departures,  and  one  death.  .  .  .  WTiile  one  poor  friend  was 
taking  his  flight  to  a  better  world,  another  was  binding  himself  to  this  one  by 
casting  the  golden  anchor  of  a  rich  and  happy  marriage.  You  are  aware,  of 
course,  that  I  allude  to  Chaurand.    God  has  rewarded  his  many  virtues  by 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  129 

granting  him  all  that  constitutes  happiness  here  below.  These  nuptials  cele- 
brated between  two  truly  Christian  families  were  very  touching.  There  was 
none  of  the  noisy  merriment  of  a  worldly /tV<f,  but  a  calm  happiness  that  re- 
minded one  of  the  marriage-feast  of  Cana,  and  recalled  the  memory  of  Isaac 
and  Tobias." 

Yet  it  is  certain  that,  while  entering  with  poetic  sympathy 
into  the  pure  joys  he  describes,  Frederic's  heart  continued  as 
yet  free  from  any  conscious  desire  to  share  them.  He  confides 
to  a  friend  that  he  is  obliged  to  be  extremely  circumspect  in 
accepting  invitations  to  soiries,  as  kindly-intentioned  persons 
are  setting  matrimonial  traps  for  him  on  every  side,  and  he  is 
exceedingly  anxious  to  avoid  being  caught.  Some  of  these 
friends,  with  a  view  to  facilitating  their  benevolent  designs, 
petitioned  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  to  grant  the  young 
Professor  an  increase  of  salary,  which  was  very  graciously 
done.  Frederic's  first  thought  on  receiving  the  information 
is,  *'  Oh  !  why  is  my  mother  not  here  to  make  me  glad  of  it?" 
His  worldly  prospects  were  brightening  daily,  now  that  he 
had  become  indifferent  to  them. 

In  the  holidays  he  made  a  journey  to  Paris  : 

"...  The  happy  advent  of  the  Easter  holidays  had  interrupted  my  class, 
and  restored  full  liberty  to  my  locomotive  faculties,  when  the  necessity  for 
settling  some  publishing  matters,  and  perhaps,  also,  a  longing  to  breathe  the 
intellectual  atmosphere  of  Paris,  decided  me  to  start  off  incog,  on  a  little  jour- 
ney in  that  direction.  .  .  ,  Everything  turned  out  just  as  I  wished,  and  I  had 
the  satisfaction  at  the  same  time  of  meeting  the  greater  number  of  my  old 
friends.  I  found  them  all  contented  and  busy ;  great  activity  in  the  religious 
press  ;  new  writers,  like  Veuillot,  carried  off  from  the  enemy  and  recruited  to 
the  good  cause  ;  everywhere  converts  of  M.  le  Cur6  Desgenettes  ;  *  the  pul- 
pits filled  by  the  Abbe  Coeur,  M.  Bautain,  the  P^re  de  Ravignan,  and  an  Abb6 
Marcelin,  who,  if  we  may  judge  by  his  cUbut,  bids  fair  to  compete  with  all 
of  them  one  day. 

"Thus  the  faith  remains  entire  in  the  midst  of  the  splitting-up  of  parties 
and  schools.  There  were  already  three  different  shades  of  opinion  amongst 
the  Legitimists,  more  than  six  distinct  categories  amongst  the  Dynasties,  and 
now  the  rancorous  divisions  of  the  Republican  opposition  are  manifesting 
themselves.  On  the  other  hand,  the  days  are  far  off  when  the  Globe  rallied 
the  ilite  of  the  young  press  to  rationalism  ;  when  the  triumvirate,  Cousin, 
Guizot,  and  Villemain,  filled  a  tribune  at  the  Sorbonne  no  less  powerful  than 

•  The  saintly  old  parish  priest  of  N.  D.  des  Victoircs,  which,  when  he  was  named  to  it,  was 
the  most  impious  and  wicked  parish  in  Taris. 


130  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

that  of  the  Palais-Bourbon.  To-day  there  is  not  a  single  review,  not  one  pub- 
lic class  bold  enough  to  formulate  a  doctrine  ;  there  is  no  stand-point  for  hete- 
rodox literature  between  sterile  criticism  and  licentious  profligacy.  In  such 
a  state  of  things  we  should  be  masters  of  the  field  if  we  had  men  enough,  if 
these  men  were  united  in  distributing  their  forces,  and  if  they  were  supported 
by  sympathy  from  without.  But,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  this  is  precisely  the 
result  that  is  being  prepared,  and  for  no  very  distant  period.  The  humble 
efforts  of  the  lowly  and  obscure  will  perhaps  have  had  their  share  in  clearing 
the  way  for  great  men  and  great  doings.  It  is  evident  that  the  movement, 
which  hcis  been  manifesting  itself  in  divers  forms,  by  turns  weak  and  violent, 
pusillanimous  and  rash,  philosophical  and  literary,  the  movement  which  pro- 
duced the  Correspondattt,  the  Revue  Europeenne,  the  Avenir,  the  Viiiver- 
stte,  the  Annaies  de  Philosophie  Chreitenne,  the  Ujiivers,  the  Conferences  of 
Notre  Dame,  the  Benedictines  of  Solesme,  the  Dominicans  of  the  Abbe  La- 
cordaire,  and  even  to  the  little  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul — facts  of  very 
unequal  importance  assuredly — it  is  evident,  I  say,  that  this  movement,  modi- 
fied and  restrained  by  circumstances,  has  begun  to  sway  the  destinies  of  the 
age.  .  .  .  Then,  again,  the  orthodox  Propaganda  of  England  and  America, 
the  Catholic  resistance  in  Ireland,  Spain,  and  Germany,  are  one  with  us  in 
their  aim,  their  pxjlemics,  their  manifestations  ;  and  the  most  cordial  union 
on  all  these  points  exists  between  those  whose  influence  is  leading  events 
and  directing  the  general  opinion.  The  Cattolico  of  Madrid,  the  Dublin  Re- 
view^ the  Journal  0/  Religious  Science  of  Rome,  the  Catholic  Miscellany  of 
Charleston,  the  Courrier  of  Franconia,  all  hold  out  their  hand  to  us.  .   .  . 

"  We  are  entering  on  a  period  of  which  no  one  can  foresee  the  vicissitudes, 
but  whose  advent  it  is  impossible  to  deny.  It  is  nevertheless  of  good  omen 
that  it  opens  with  an  act  of  justice  to  the  past.  Filial  piety  brings  luck.  In 
linking  ourselves  once  more  by  the  old  traditional  bond  to  the  eternal  truths 
of  Christianity,  and  to  the  laborious  conquests  of  human  experience,  we  shall 
be  enabled  to  follow  with  less  danger  the  progressive  instinct  which  should 
enrich,  and  not  repudiate,  this  glorious  inheritance.  Science  will  advance  at 
a  swifter  pace  when  it  finds  the  ground  of  first  principles  no  longer  disputed ; 
talent  will  no  longer  be  wasted  calling  into  question,  in  this  nineteenth  cen- 
tury of  ours,  problems  which  Christianity  had  solved  definitively,  after  they 
had  vainly  exhausted  all  the  forces  of  human  genius  during  four  thousand 
years  of  ig^norance  and  doubt. 

"  The  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  was  not  one  of  the  least  sources  of  joy 
and  hope  which  I  met  with  in  my  last  visit  to  Paris.  I  saw  assembled  in  the 
amphitheatre  where  it  holds  its  sessions  more  than  six  hundred  members, 
which  does^iot  make  the  total  of  its  body  in  Paris.  The  majority  was  com- 
posed of  poor  students,  but  set  off,  as  it  were,  by  a  few  persons  of  the  very 
highest  social  position.  I  elbowed  a  Peer  of  France,  a  Councillor  of  State, 
several  Generals  and  distinguished  writers.  I  counted  twenty-five  pupils  of 
the  Ecole  Normale  (out  of  seventy-five  that  it  numbers),  ten  of  the  Polytech- 
nique,  one  or  two  of  the  Ecole  d'Etat  Major.  That  morning  one  hundred 
and  fifty  members  had  gone  up  to  the  altar  together.  Letters  were  received 
from  more  than  fifteen  towns  in  France  where  conferepces  are  in  full  oper«^- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  131 

tion  ;  a  similar  number  have  been  set  on  foot  this  year.  We  are  now  nearly 
two  thousand  young  men  enrolled  in  this  peaceful  crusade  of  charity.  .  .  . 
Now,  too,  that  an  ever-increasing  pauperism  stands  face  to  face,  in  rage  and 
desperation,  with  a  moneyed  aristocracy  whose  bowels  of  mercy  have  grown 
hardened,  it  is  well  that  there  should  be  found  mediators  who  may  prevent  a 
collision  of  which  no  man  may  foretell  the  horrible  disasters,  who  will  gain  a 
hearing  in  both  camps,  and  who  will  carry  words  of  resignation  to  one  and 
counsels  of  mercy  to  the  other,  giving  everywhere  the  f)assword  :  reconcilia>- 
tion  and  love." 

It  is  only  at  the  end  of  this  long  letter  that  he  mentions 
a  matter  of  serious  interest  to  himself  personally.  Monsieur 
Cousin,  who  still  coveted  him  for  his  own  department, 
received  him  most  affectionately,  when  Ozanam,  as  in  duty 
bound,  paid  his  respects  to  '•  his  most  honored  patron  at  the 
ministry."  He  invited  him  to  breakfast,  and  enquired  with 
friendly  interest  into  his  young  protege's  position  and  pros- 
pects. "  He  told  me  of  his  intention  to  name  me  to  Quinet's 
place  next  year,"  says  Ozanam,  "  but  he  put  a  price  upon 
the  favor,  of  which  he  is  naturally  the  master.  He  exacts 
that  I  shall  come  to  Paris  in  the  month  of  September  to 
compete  for  the  Agre'gation  de  Ittiirature^  a  new  institution 
whose  success  he  holds  to  with  an  author's  natural  affection. 
He  has  repeated  this  invitation  to  me  through  several 
friends,  then  through  the  rector,  and  finally  by  a  formal 
letter,  so  that  it  is  impossible  for  me  to  get  out  of  it.  And 
yet  the  difficulty  of  the  programme,  bristling  with  the  most 
knotty  Greek  texts,  almost  throws  me  into  despair,  and,  with 
the  work  that  my  class  gives  me,  I  have  the  greatest  diffi- 
culty to  make  out  as  much  time  as  is  absolutely  necessary  for 
the  most  superficial  preparation." 

He  continued  nevertheless  to  go  on  with  it,  and  describes 
himself  as  devouring  an  enormous  quantity  of  Latin  without 
prejudice  to  the  Code  of  Commerce,  and  being  on  the  point 
of  losing  his  head,  if  God  does  not  come  to  the  rescue.  "  At 
the  same  time,"  he  says,  "  the  Propagation  of  the  faith  could 
not  be  neglected,  and  in  the  July  number  of  tlie  Annales  you 
will  find  a  long  article,  detestable  in  form  very  often,  but 
important  in  substance,  which   I   wa3   obliged   to  write,  in 


132  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

order  to  give  from  authentic  sources  a  general  statistic  of  the 
missions." 

The  Agregation  in  question  was  a  competitive  examination 
which  candidates  for  professorships  in  the  University  were 
obhged  to  undergo  in  virtue  of  a  recent  decree  of  M.  Cousin. 
Ozanam,  once  fairly  embarked  as  a  competitor,  threw  all  his 
energy  into  the  necessary  preparation.  Now,  as  on  the 
occasion  of  his  nomination  to  the  Chair  of  Law,  he  resolved 
to  accept  the  issue  as  the  final  indication  of  his  destiny.  If 
he  succeeded,  and  if  the  University  were  open  to  him,  he 
would  regard  it  as  a  sign  that  he  was  to  serve  truth  in  that 
spliere.  He  had  never  wavered  in  the  internal  conviction 
that  whatever  real  good  he  was  to  do  for  his  fellow-men,  as  a 
secular,  must  be  done  by  teaching,  not  merely  the  law,  as  at 
present,  but  philosophy  and  history.  The  only  way  in  which 
he  could  fulfil  his  vow  was  by  making  knowledge,  in  so  far 
as  he  possessed  it,  instrumental  in  the  manifestation  of  truth, 
and  using  science  as  a  weapon  to  serve  the  cause  of  Chris- 
tianity. He  could  not  disguise  from  himself  that  Paris  was 
the  centre  where  this  service  could  be  best  performed.  At 
Lyons  young  men  had  neither  time  nor  inclination  for  at- 
tending philosophical  lectures ;  as  soon  as  they  had  finished 
their  college  studies  and  taken  their  baccalaureat  they  went 
into  business.  If,  therefore,  Ozanam  succeeded  at  the  ap- 
proaching examinations,  was  it  not  essential,  looking  at  his 
vocation  from  the  point  of  faithfulness  and  self-devotion,  that 
he  should  go  forth  from  his  own  people  and  begin  life  anew 
in  Paris  ?  M.  Ampere,  whose  opinion  had  greater  weight 
with  him  perhaps  than  any  other,  strongly  urged  him  to 
adopt  this  course.  While  he  was  revolving  these  problems 
in  his  mind  a  change  was  at  hand  which  was  to  render 
their  solution  still  more  difficult  to  him. 

The  Abb6,  now  the  Pere,  Lacordaire  was  still  in  Rome, 
but  he  had  written  to  Ozanam,  giving  him  a  radiant  descrip- 
tion of  his  life  in  the  novitiate,  where  he  had  been  joined  by 
eight  young  Frenchmen,  all  elect  souls,  one  more  gifted  than 


lAfe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  133 

the  other.  Ozanam,  in  spite  of  his  sympathy  and  admiration 
for  these  high  examples,  did  not  feel  any  more  definite  at- 
traction to  follow  them.  He  saw  no  hand  distincdy  beckon- 
ing him  on.  He  would  wait  and  see  Pere  Lacordaire,  and 
examine  the  matter  more  closely.  The  Abbe  Noirot,  who 
knew  him  better  than  any  one,  had  stood  prudently  aloof 
while  the  young  man  was  thus  groping  his  way  to  the  light : 
but  whenever  Ozanam  opened  his  heart  to  him  on  the  sub- 
ject, his  answer  invariably  was  '' Manez  vous,  man  chet^ 
mariez-vous."  And  the  other  would  shake  his  head,  not  ven- 
turing to  offer  a  flat  contradiction  to  tiie  advice  of  so  wise  a 
friend,  though  inwardly  resenting  it.  The  Abb6  had  always 
remained  unshaken  in  his  opinion  that  Ozanam  had  no  voca- 
tion for  the  monastic  life,  that  there  was  in  him  a  need  of 
tenderness  and  sympathy  and  encouragement,  whicn  made  it 
desirable  for  him  to  marry ;  he  had,  moreover,  settled  in  his 
own  mind  the  wife  that  would  best  suit  him  out  of  all  the 
young  ladies  in  Lyons.  But  the  old  philosopher  was  far  too 
cunning  a  judge  of  human  nature,  and  of  this  particular 
specimen  of  it,  to  mention  this,  or  even  to  make  any  attempt 
to  bring  about  a  meeting,  shrewdly  suspecting  that  the  gen- 
tleman's perverse  indifference  and  systematic  habit  of  flying 
from  those  decoy  birds,  whom  he  classed  in  a  body  as  "  ces 
demoiselles,"  would  frustrate  the  opportunity.  Providence, 
however,  who  loves  the  pure  of  heart,  and  takes  their  destiny 
in  hand,  was  gently  leading  Ozanam  blindfold  on  to  his.  He 
went  one  day  to  pay  a  visit  to  M.  Soulacroix,  the  rector  of 
tlie  Academy.  In  passing  through  the  drawing-room  to  his 
host's  study,  he  stopped  to  present  his  respects  to  Madame 
Soulacroix,  and,  while  doing  so,  noticed  seated  in  the  window 
a  fair  young  girl,  who  was  too  busy  attending  to  an  invalid 
brother  to  pay  any  particular  attention  to  the  stranger  whom 
her  mother  was  speaking  to.  The  stranger  passed  on,  but 
while  discoursing  on  philosophy  and  other  lofty  matters  with 
the  learned  host,  his  eyes  involuntarily  wandered  through  the 
open  door  to  the  group  in  the  window,  where  the  bright,  fair 


134  ^ife  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

face  was  bending  over  the  young  brother,  caressing  and 
amusing  him.  "  How  sweet  it  would  be  to  have  a  sister  hke 
that  to  love  one!"  sighed  Ozanam,  as  he  watched  the  two; 
and,  though  he  did  not  then  suspect  it,  from  that  hour  he  was 
a  lost  man. 

At  the  end  of  September  he  went  to  Paris  to  pass  the  most 
formidable  examination  he  had  yet  encountered.  He  gives 
us  the  history  of  the  event  himself  in  a  letter  written  three 
weeks  later : 

♦'  I  came  up  in  a  terrible  fright,  convinced  that  my  candidature  would  play 
me  a  sorry  trick  by  causing  me  to  lose  whatever  little  consideration  I  enjoyed 
already  in  the  minds  of  the  Professors.  When  the  dreaded  day  came,  we 
were,  seven  of  us,  shut  up  under  lock  and  key  in  a  hall  of  the  Sorbonne,  with 
eight  hours  before  us,  for  a  Latin  dissertation  '  On  the  Causes  which  arrested 
the  Development  of  Tragedy  among  the  Romans.'  I  happened  to  be  up  in 
the  question,  but,  not  being  in  the  habit  of  composing  quickly,  I  was  at  bay 
wlien  the  fatal  hour  struck,  and  I  was  obliged  to  hand  in  a  rough  copy  dis- 
gracefully drawn  up.  The  same  adventure  next  day  with  the  French  disser- 
tation '  On  the  Historical  Value  of  Bossuet's  Funeral  Orations.'  The  auspices 
were  so  unfavorable  that,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  indiscretion  of  one  of  the 
judges,  who  hinted  to  me  that  my  compositions  had  succeeded,  I  should  have 
withdrawn  from  the  competition. 

"  Then  came  three  separate  argumentations  on  different  days,  and  of  three 
hours  each,  on  Greek,  Latin,  and  French  texts,  given  twenty-four  hours  in 
advance.  In  Greek,  I  had  to  explain  a  chorus  of  Euripides'  Helen  and  a  frag- 
ment of  Halicarnassus'  Rhetoric— \try  little  philology,  as  you  may  imagine, 
and  a  vast  amount  of  words,  Helen  considered  as  a  poetic  creation  and  a  re- 
ligious myth  ;  the  history  of  oratorical  art  in  Athens  and  Rome.  Finally,  a 
fragment  of  Lucian  and  a  theological  chapter  of  Pliny,  discussion  on  the  role 
of  Caesar  and  on  the  revolutions  of  religious  doctrines  amongst  the  Romans. 

"  In  French,  La  Fontaine's  Philemon  et  Baucis  and  Montesquieu's  dialogue 
of  Sylla  and  Eucrates ;  here  came  in  a  few  bold  conjectures  on  the  causes  of 
Sylla's  abdication,  a  still  more  rash  comparison  between  Montesquieu  and  St. 
Thomas  Aquinas.  This  lively  outburst  of  Catholicism,  and  two  or  three 
others  which  I  indulged  in,  gave  offence  neither  to  the  audience  nor  the  jury  ; 
and  a  few  reminiscences  of  Roman  law,  brought  in  in  order  to  interpret  cer- 
tain passages  which  without  this  would  have  been  difficult  of  comprehension, 
were  equally  well  received. 

"After  this  ordeal  followed  the  examination  in  the  four  foreign  literatures. 
I  went  in  at  once  for  Dante,  where  T  felt  at  home  ;  Spanish,  in  which  I  had 
taken  ten  lessons,  succeeded  wonderfully.  I  pulled  through  Shakespeare  ;  and 
as  I  had  the  luck  to  fall  on  one  of  the  finest  and  most  touching  passages  of 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  135 

Klopstock,  the  emotion  with  which  I  translated  it  produced  the  best  effect. 
There  still  remained  two  lectures  on  different  subjects  for  each  candidate,  and 
designated  by  lot,  one  twenty-four  hours,  the  other  one  hour,  beforehand. 
The  subject  of  ancient  literature  for  me  was  '  The  History  of  the  Greek  and 
Latin  Scholiasts.'  This  looked  really  like  a  spiteful  trick  of  fate,  and  it  was 
so  well  known  that  I  was  not  up  in  this  philological  specialiti  that  when  the 
ticket  which  fell  to  me  was  read  aloud,  a  mischievous  titter  ran  through  the 
public,  composed  chiefly  of  University  men.  I  gave  myself  up  for  lost,  and — 
although  one  of  my  rivals,  M.  Egger,  with  great  generosity,  passed  on  to  me 
some  capital  books  which  he  had  by  him — after  a  night  of  watching  and  a  day 
of  anguish,  I  was  more  dead  than  alive  when  the  moment  came  for  me  to 
speak.  Despair  of  myself  prompted  rae  to  make  an  act  of  faith  in  God  such 
as  I  never  made  before  ;  never  either  was  I  so  rewarded.  In  short,  your  friend 
held  forth  on  the  scholiasts  during  seven  quarters  of  an  hour  with  a  freedom, 
an  assurance  that  astounded  himself ;  he  succeeded  not  alone  in  interesting 
but  in  moving  and  captivating  both  the  judges  and  the  audience,  and 
withdrew  with  all  the  honors  of  war,  having  brought  over  the  laughers  to  his 
side." 

The  last  ordeal  was  comparatively  easy,  being  a  literary 
criticism  on  the  century  of  Louis  XIV.,  where  Ozanam,  to 
use  his  own  words,  "  gave  himself  his  fling."  He  was  terrified 
for  a  moment  at  his  own  audacity.  "  I  feared  that  I  had 
blown  up  the  ship,"  he  says,  "  but  all  was  taken  in  excellent 
part."  They  proceeded  to  the  ballot  (scruiin)^  and  his  name 
came  out  first.  He  could  hardly  credit  it.  His  slowness  in 
composing,  and  his  great  difliculty  in  improvisation,  made 
him  pronounce  the  verdict  "un  mensonge  bizarre,"  seeing 
that  amongst  the  competitors  were  five  young  professors, 
"  who  to  great  learning  united  a  ready,  brilliant,  and  graceful 
improvisation." 

♦•  If  all  this  be  not  a  dream,"  he  adds,  "  or  an  impertinent  trick  of  chance, 
there  is  but  one  way  of  justifying  it.  God  gave  me  the  grace  to  bring  to  the 
struggle  a  faith  which,  even  when  it  does  not  seek  to  manifest  itself  outwardly, 
animates  the  language,  maintains  harmony  in  the  intelligence,  and  imparts 
warmth  and  life  to  the  speech.  Thus  I  may  truly  say,  in  hoe  vict\  and  this 
idea,  which  at  first  sight  seems  the  result  of  pride,  is  precisely  what  humbles 
at  the  same  time  that  it  reassures  me. 

"  I  am  confounded  by  so  wonderfully  providential  a  success.  I  seem  to  see 
in  it  what  you  see — an  indication  of  the  designs  of  God  upon  me  ;  a  real  vo- 
cation, what  for  so  many  years  my  prayers  have  been  imploring.  My  eldest 
%Other  is  of  the  same  opinion  ;  I  shall  therefore  walk,  still  in  tremb\in|f,  but 


136  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanatn. 

with  a  calmer  step,  in  the  new  career  which  has  been  opened  to  me  by  this 
singular  event." 

M.  Fauriel,  Professor  at  the  Sorbonne,  immediately  offered 
Ozanam  the  position  of  Assistant  Professor  in  the  Chair  of 
Foreign  Literature,  which  he  himself  held.  The  position  was 
a  precarious  one,  he  being  liable  to  lose  it  in  the  event  of  M. 
Fauriel's  health  being  sufficiently  restored  to  enable  him  to 
dispense  with  a  supplea7ii^  as  it  is  termed,  and  the  salary  was 
not  quite  a  hundred  pounds  a  year.  The  duties  were,  how- 
ever, such  as  Ozanam  felt  especially  qualified  to  fill,  and  the 
offer,  coming  immediately  upon  his  extraordinary  and  un- 
looked-for success,  seemed  like  a  direct  invitation  from  Provi- 
dence. The  subject  which  he  was  to  treat  in  the  coming 
year  was  the  literature  of  Germany  in  the  middle  ages,  begin- 
ning with  the  Nibehmgen  and  the  Book  of  Heroes.  His. 
"literary  conscience,"  as  he  called  it,  determined  him  to 
undertake  a  short  tour  in  Germany,  in  order  to  study  the 
country  upon  whose  literature  he  was  going  to  lecture. 

It  was  an  interesting  and  critical  moment  for  studying  the 
religious  aspects  of  that  country.  The  Archbishop  of  Cologne, 
Monseigneur  de  Droste-Wischering,  was  in  prison  owing  to 
the  firmness  which  he  had  displayed  against  the  Prussian 
Government  when  it  issued  a  decree  ordering  the  Catholic 
clergy  to  conform  to  the  prescriptions  of  the  Prussian  law  on 
the  subject  of  marriages  between  Catholics  and  Protestants. 
A  few  prelates  thought  fit  to  yield  to  the  pressure  of  the  State, 
and  not  to  exact  from  the  husband  and  wife  the  promise  that 
the  children  should  be  brought  up  Catholics.  Monseigneur 
de  Droste  was  the  foremost  to  set  the  example  of  uncompro- 
mising resistance,  conformably  to  the  canonical  laws  as  laid 
down  by  Pius  VIII.  in  a  Brief  of  the  25th  of  March,  1830. 
He  was  forthwith  seized,  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  by  order 
of  Frederic  William  III.,  King  of  Prussia,  and  imprisoned  in 
the  fortress  of  Minden,  fron^  which  he  was  soon  after  trans- 
ferred to  that  of  Colberg  in  Pomerania.  On  hearing  of  this 
Pope  Gregory  XVI.  pronounced  an  allocution  in  full  con- 


Life  and  Works  jf  Frederic  Ozanam.  137 

sistory,  and  therein  loudly  expressed  his  admiration  of  the 
captive  prelate's  courageous  conduct,  and  his  sympathy  with 
his  sufferings. 

Ozanam  made  but  a  short  stay  at  Aix-la-Chapelle,  where 
he  visited  the  tomb  of  Charlemagne,  "  the  great  black  stone, 
with  its  two  words  of  sublime  simplicity — Carlo  magno^  He 
hurried  on  to  Cologne,  the  classic  soil  of  German  Catholicism, 
where  the  air  is  filled  with  marvellous  legends,  in  which  faith 
and  superstition  are  so  fascinatingly  interwoven  that  the  peo- 
ple cease  to  distinguish  between  the  contending  claims,  and 
Accept  them  all  in  childish  and  exuberant  credulity.  He 
visited  the  glorious  cathedral,  unfinished  after  its  centuries  of 
existence,  and  laments  over  its  desolate  condition  as  of  one 
'*  who  has  passed  the  age  of  hope  and  has  not  even  the  con- 
solations of  memory." 

",  ,  ,  I  saw  the  archiepiscopal  throne  empty,"  he  writes,  "but  the 
church  was  full  to  overflowing.  The  crowd  was  packed  so  close  that  in  some 
places  it  was  impossible  to  kneel  down.  Picture  to  yourself  the  great  audience 
of  Notre  Dame,  but  fancy  it  believing  and  praying.  I  must  admit,  neverthe- 
less, that  this  German  piety  would  astonish  us  a  little  by  the  imperturbable 
calm  of  its  attitudes — always  standing  up,  with  big  blue  eyes  lifted  to  the 
roof  or  wandering  over  the  stained-glass  windows,  its  ear  evidently  turned  in 
the  direction  of  the  organ,  its  hands  hanging,  or  fingering  a  book  whose 
leaves  don't  turn  over ;  from  time  to  time  a  long,  methodical  sign  of  the 
cross,  then  the  final  genuflexion,  and  the  Ite  mtssa  est  taken  literally.  Worse 
than  this,  the  shops  are  almost  universally  open  on  Sunday,  and  the  crowds 
that  pour  straight  out  from  Benediction  to  the  /ites  of  the  Casinos  testify  to 
an  inconsistency  ot  character,  or  a  want  of  proper  instruction,  which  leads 
one  to  deplore  still  more  deeply  the  absence  of  the  pastor." 

He  revels  for  one  day  amidst  the  bewildering  beauty  of  the 
churches  of  Cologne,  once  *'  the  Rome  of  the  Rhine." 

"  My  souvenirs  of  Italy  are  still  fresh,"  he  says  ;  "  nevertheless,  I  must  con- 
fess that  nowhere,  except  in  Rome,  did  I  meet  with  anything  to  be  compared 
to  the  variety,  multiplicity,  and  antiquity  of  the  sacred  edifices  through  which 
I  wandered  with  delight  the  whole  day,  .  .  .  crying  out  with  David,  only 
in  a  less  perfect  sense,  '  Quara  dilecta  tabernacula  tua,  Domine  virtutum  1 ' 
No,  it  was  not  without  reason  that  our  fathers  would  have  it  so.  The  house 
of  God  ought  to  be  loved  by  men,  and  the  place  that  was  to  be  holy  should 
also  be  beautiful.  Admiration  is  eminently  a  moral  sentiment ;  it  elevates, 
purifies,  and  prepares.     Vandalism   and  Jansenism  gave  us  a  naked,  im- 


138  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

poverished  worship,  a  sombre  piety.  They  effaced,  as  scandals,  the  pictures 
which  attracted  the  gaze  of  childhood  ;  they  silenced  the  music,  whose  power 
lifted  up  the  hearts  of  the  young  men  ;  they  destroyed  the  dim  twilight  that 
fell  softly  on  the  old  man's  eyelids';  they  suppressed  those  popular  solemni- 
ties, those  pious  representations,  those  triumphal  processions,  to  which  the 
people  flocked  so  joyously.  Under  pretence  of  driving  out  the  venders  from 
the  temple,  they  have  driven  away  the  little  ones  who  cried  Hosanna  !  And 
in  the  midst  of  those  walls,  whitewashed  and  despoiled,  they  have  placed  a 
new  divinity,  powerful  in  evoking  silence  and  void  around  her.  She  is  called 
Ennui. ''^ 

These  reflections  suggest  to  him  the  necessity  of  seconding 
all  efforts  tending  to  the  restoration  of  Christian  art.  His 
artistic  sense  is  shocked  at  every  step  to  see  these  magnificent 
architectural  chefs-d'oeuvre  disfigured  and  mutilated  by  "  unen- 
lightened repairs  and  offensive  decorations,  daubing  and  ig- 
noble coloring  thrown  for  the  past  five-and-twenty  years  over 
these  beautiful  edifices  by  the  official  trowel  of  the  engineers." 
And  yet  the  architects  of  these  lovely  wonders  were  Germans 
of  from  the  eighth  to  the  eleventh  century,  "  great-grandsons 
of  the  Franks  of  Clovis,  whom  two  hundred  and  fifty  years 
of  Christianity  had  sufficed  to  initiate  into  the  most  sublime 
and  delicate  mysteries  of  true  beauty !  " 

Ozanam  took  ample  notes  of  all  these  things  as  he  passed 
rapidly  along  the  Rhine,  and  observes  with  satisfaction  that 
he  is  gleaning  much  that  will  be  useful  to  him  in  his  future 
studies. 

"  When  I  shall  have  seen  Mayence,  where  I  arrive  this  evening,"  he  says, 
**  Frankfort,  and  Worms,  the  Germany  of  the  Middle  Ages  will  have  passed 
before  my  eyes.  It  was  there,  it  was  at  Cologne  and  Aix-la-Chapelle,  that 
the  emperors  were  crowned  and  deposed,  that  the  diets  were  held,  that  the 
crusades  organized.  The  names  of  Charlemagne,  of  the  Othos,  the  Henries, 
and  the  Frederics,  reappear  wherever  there  is  an  historical  stone  ;  and  there  is 
not  a  stone,  not  a  rock,  but  has  its  history,  its  tradition,  or  its  fable." 

The  weird,  grandiose,  and  poetic  landscape  of  the  Rhine- 
country  surprises  and  enchants  him.  It  is  unlike  anything  he 
has  seen  elsewhere,  in  France,  in  Italy,  or  Switzerland.  The 
fantastic  lines  of  the  mountains  as  they  rise  and  fall  and  sally 
in  and  out  by  the  banks  of  the  broad,  deep,  limpid  stream, 
whose  waters  do  no*;  strike  him  as  "  bine,"  but  as  a  "  beautiful 


Life  and  Works  oj  Frederic  Ozanam.  139 

sea-green,"  fill  Ozanam  with  enthusiasm.  He  is  quite  pre- 
pared to  accept  the  marvellous  legends  that  echo  through 
those  solemn  and  airy  hills. 

"Here  is  the  rock  of  the  dragon,  where  a  German  maiden,  the  Christian 
Andromeda,  crucifix  in  hand,  confounded  the  infernal  serpent  to  which  her 
idolatrous  countrymen  had  exposed  her  ;  opposite  rises  the  great  stone  of  Ro- 
land ;  the  hero  came  hither  to  mourn  for  his  fiancie  and  die.  .  .  .  The 
Nibelungen,  the  Carlovingian  epic,  and  the  cycle  of  the  Holy  Grail  are  there 
face  to  face.  Myths  still  more  ancient  peopled  the  hill  of  Lurley  and  the 
caves  of  Kedrich  with  elfs  and  dwarfs.  But,  above  myths  and  popular  tradi- 
tion, arise  the  grave  realities  of  history." 

He  touches  with  a  light  and  accurate  finger  the  prominent 
events  that  pass  before  his  historical  eye — the  Konigs-Stuhl, 
where  the  electors  of  the  empire  held  council  in  days  of  trou- 
ble and  alarm ;  the  Castle  of  Rheinstein,  where  the  freeboot- 
ing  barons,  who  made  the  terror  of  the  Rhine  and  sat  as 
portraits  for  so  many  of  its  gigantic  myths,  used  to  assemble 
to  divide  their  plunder,  and  cut  each  other's  throats  when  they 
could  not  agree  about  their  respective  share  in  it ;  the  ruins 
of  the  monastery  where  St.  Hildegard  wrote  her  visions,  the 
chapels  founded  by  St.  Helen,  the  bridge  of  Drusus,  "  the 
soil  where,  for  the  first  time,  the  Roman  eagle  was  planted, 
and  where,  for  fifteen  years,  ours  too  reigned ;  the  battle-field 
of  our  exploits  of  yesterday,  and — who  knows  ? — perhaps  ot 
to-morrow." 

While  Ozanam  is  tracking  these  footprints  of  the  past,  and 
indulging  in  the  meditations  which  they  naturally  suggested  to 
so  reflective  a  mind,  a  certain  sadness  steals  over  him  at  the 
thought  that  these  bright  and  beautiful  scenes,  which  have 
flitted  before  him  like  a  vision,  are  now  about  to  vanish  and 
rejoin  others  once  equally  enjoyed,  but  now  mere  memories 
that  grow  paler  and  dimmer  as  the  days  go  by.  **  I  wish," 
he  says,  '*  that  I  could  at  least  carry  away  in  my  mind  all  that 
my  eyes  are  forsaking;  but  my  memory  does  not  retain  the 
look  of  places.  The  shadow  they  leave  behind  fluctuates 
there  for  a  while,  and  too  often  ends  by  vanishing  altogether." 
He  begins  to   fear,  moreover,  that  his  excursion  has  been  a 


140  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

foolish  escapade,  that  he  has  been  like  those  scribblers  of 
feuilletons  who  fly  off  "  to  discover  "  a  country,  or,  at  best, 
that  it  has  been  but  a  flimsy  satisfaction  granted  to  his  scru- 
ples, "  a  shuffling  pretence,"  as  he  says,  "  to  enable  me  to  say 
to  my  audience  this  winter:  Gentlemen,  I  have  seen!  Just 
as,  when  I  was  a  little  boy,  I  used  to  dip  the  tips  of  my  fin- 
gers into  the  water,  in  order  to  be  able  U>  say  to  my  mother 
without  telling  a  lie,  '  I  have  washed  myself.'  Or,  to  fall 
back  on  grander  comparisons,  I  am  something  like  Caligula, 
who  went  as  far  as  the  Rhine,  picked  up  pebbles,  and  came 
back  to  Rome  to  receive  the  honors  of  a  triumph,  with  the 
surname  of  Gerfnanicus/" 

On  his  return  from  this  flying  expedition,  Ozanam  was 
called  upon  to  prove  himself  by  ofte  of  those  elections  which 
^are  seldom  forced  upon  ordinary  destinies ;  one  of  those  deci- 
sions that  place  a  man  face  to  face  with  conscience  and  prin- 
ciple, leaving  him  no  alternative  but  to  renounce  his  ideal,  or 
cleave  to  it  with  a  fidelity  little  short  of  heroic. 

That  passing  interview  which  had  moved  his  gentle  envy 
of  the  brother  who  had  "such  a  sweet  sister  to  love  him," 
had  been  followed  up  by  others,  and  soon  there  was  kindled 
jn  Frederic's  heart  as  pure  a  flame  as  ever  earthly  love  lighted 
in  a  manly  breast.  He  offered  himself  to  M.  Soulacroix  as  a 
candidate  for  his  daughter's  hand,  and  was  accepted.  M. 
Soulacroix  had  long  admired  Ozanam,  and  watched  his  career 
with  interest,  augurmg  great  things  for  him  in  the  future. 
He  was  not  a  rich  man  himself,  and  he  was  not  ambitious 
that  his  child  should  marry  one;  at  the  same  time  he  had 
that  far-sighted  parental  prudence  which  makes  a  French 
father  consider  it  little  short  of  criminal  to  give  his  daughter 
to  a  man  who  cannot  show  a  reasonable  guarantee  for  her 
future. 

Ozanam's  pecuniary  position  was  fair  enough,  seeing  that 
he  was  not  yet  seven-and-tvventy,  and  that  his  talent  was 
steadily  raising  him  to  fame.  But  all  this  was  compromised 
now.     The  recent  triumph  in  Paris,  by  inviting  him  to  the 


Life  and  Wvrks  of  Frederic  Ozanant.  141 

Sorbonne,  left  him  no  choice,  if  he  accepted,  but  to  throw  up 
his  position  at  Lyons,  and  embark  on  his  new  honors  with  a 
precarious  salary  of  ;£^ioo  a  year,  and  the  possibility  of  losing 
this  any  day  by  the  death  of  M.  Fauriel.  When  he  came  to 
consider  the  matter  by  the  prosaic  light  of  pecuniary  considera- 
tions, it  was  not  satisfactory  to  a  man  about  to  take  charge 
of  a  wife.  What  would  the  wife  herself  say  to  it  ?  Above 
all,  what  would  her  father  say  ?  Before  he  had  summed  up 
courage  to  lay  the  case  before  M.  Soulacroix,  an  incident 
occurred  which  still  further  complicated  things.  M.  Ville- 
main,  who  had  succeeded  M.  Cousin  as  Minister  of  Public 
Instruction,  heard  of  Ozanam's  engagement  to  the  daughter 
of  his  friend  the  rector  of  the  Academy,  and  wrote  to  offer 
hira  the  Chair  of  Foreign  Literature  in  the  University  of 
Lyons,  recently  vacant  through  the  promotion  of  M.  Quinet 
to  the  College  de  France.  This,  with  the  Chair  of  Law, 
which  he  would  continue  to  fill,  and  other  lectures  that  he 
gave  at  Lyons,  brought  his  income  up  to  close  on  ;^6oo  a 
year.  The  position,  moreover,  in  both  cases,  was  for  life. 
Here,  indeed,  was  an  opportunity  of  proving  the  sincerity  of 
his  ideal  vocation.  Should  he  renounce  this  substantial  cer- 
tainty, and  go  to  Paris  on  a  precarious  hundred  a  year,  sim- 
ply because,  as  he  believed,  he  could  serve  the  cause  of 
Christian  philosophy  more  efficaciously  there  than  in  his 
native  city  ?  After  asking  for  light  that  he  might  see  God's 
will,  and  then  at  any  and  every  sacrifice  accomplish  it,  he 
went  to  consult  M.  Soulacroix.  The  rector's  first  movement 
was,  naturally  enough,  one  of  emphatic  disapproval.  It 
seemed  a  mad  imprudence  on  Ozanam's  part,  and  it  certainly 
would  be  on  his  if  he  encouraged  it,  or  sanctioned  his  daugh- 
ter's marriage  under  the  circumstances.  Ozanam,  however, 
pleaded  his  cause  so  eloquently  that  the  wise  elderly  man 
had  to  admit  there  was  something  to  be  said  on  the  side  of 
the  heroics.  He  had,  moreover,  almost  unlimited  confidence 
in  tlie  young  man's  energy  and  talent,  and  knew  that  he 
would  avail  himself  to  the  full  of  the  magnificent  opportunity 


/ 


142  Life  ami  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

which  the  Sorbonne  opened  to  him,  and  that  he  was  likely, 
moreover,  to  reach  eminence  much  sooner  by  being  brought 
into  personal  contact,  as  he  would  be  in  Paris,  with  the  influ- 
ential men  who  could  serve  him.  But  it  was  one  thing  to 
admit  all  this  in  the  abstract,  and  another  to  counsel  his  son- 
in-law  to  act  upon  it.  Ozanam,  with  a  stroke  of  policy 
worthy  of  Talleyrand,  determined  to  appeal  to  his  fiancie^ 
shrewdly  suspecting  that  if  he  won  her  consent  the  day  was 
gained.  He  laid  the  case  frankly  before  her.  If  they 
remained  at  Lyons,  he  could  offer  her  comfort,  security  for 
the  future,  and  the  happiness,  which  both  of  them  valued,  of 
remaining  amongst  their  own  people;  but  by  doing  this  he 
would  forfeit  what  he  believed  to  be  the  noblest  part  of  his 
service,  that  which  involved  sacrifice  and  self-renunciation. 
In  going  to  Paris  they  would  have  to  face  poverty;  but  he 
would  have  a  wide  field  for  usefulness,  and  all  the  conditions 
of  a  noble  mission.  Had  she  sufficient  trust  in  herself  and  in 
him  to  choose  the  higher  and  harder  part  ?  Amelie  placed 
her  hand  in  his,  and  said,  "  I  will  trust  you." 

And  so  they  went  forth  together,  rich  in  mutual  confidence, 
in  love  and  faith,  though  poor  enough  in  the  goods  of  this 
world. 

The  moment  this  choice  was  approved  and  his  marriage 
decided,  the  most  profound  peace  succeeded  to  the  anxiety 
and  agitation  to  which  Ozanam  had  been  a  prey  during  the 
interval  of  uncertainty. 

"  Oh  !  how  much  I  have  to  say  to  you,"  he  writes  to  Lallier,  "  and  how 
suddenly  this  grave  question  of  vocation,  so  long  doubtful,  has  been  solved  I 
Just  as  Divine  Providence  calls  me  back  to  the  perilous  sojourn  of  the  capital, 
He  sends  me  an  angel  to  guard  and  console  my  solitude  !  I  now  go,  leaving 
behind  me  an  engagement  which  is  to  be  concluded  on  my  return.  I  should 
have  had  recourse  to  your  good  advice  if  events  had  not  precipitated  them- 
selves with  such  unforeseen  rapidity.  I  have  now  recourse  to  your  prayers. 
May  God  preserve,  during  these  six  months,  her  whom  He  seems  to  have 
chosen  for  me,  and  whose  smile  is  the  first  sunbeam  of  happiness  that  has 
brightened  my  life  since  my  poor  father's  death . 

"You  will  find  me  very  tenderly  smitten.  I  don't  attempt  to  disguise  it, 
although  sometimes  I  cannot  help  laughing  at  myself  I  I  thought  my  heart 
was  more  invulnerable.     .     .     . 


Life  and  Works  of  Ftederic  Ozanam.  143 

"  You  will  find  me  very  happy.  It  will  be  a  compensation  for  all  the  times 
that  you  shared  my  sorrows." 

His  marriage  took  place  on  the  23d  of  June,  in  the  sunny 
month  of  the  roses. 

"  Last  Wednesday,"  he  informs  Lallier  a  week  after  the  event,  "at  ten 
o'clock  in  the  morning:,  in  the  church  of  St.  Nizier,  your  friend  was  on  his 
knees  ;  at  the  altar  his  eldest  brother  lifted  up  his  sacerdotal  hands,  while  the 
younger  one  made  the  liturgical  responses.  At  his  side  you  would  have  seen 
a  young  girl  dressed  in  white,  and  veiled,  pious  as  an  angel,  and  already — she 
gives  me  leave  to  say  it — tender  and  affectionate  as  a  friend.  Happier  than 
I,  she  was  surrounded  by  her  parents  ;  all  that  Heaven  has  left  me  of  a  family 
here  below  was  there  ;  and  my  old  comrades,  my  friends  of  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul,  with  numerous  acquaintances,  filled  the  choir  and  peopled  the  nave. 
It  was  beautiful.  The  strangers  who  had  strayed  in  by  chance  were  deeply 
moved.  As  to  me,  I  did  not  know  where  I  was.  I  could  scarcely  restrain  my 
tears,  big,  delicious  tears,  as  I  felt  the  Divine  blessing  descending  on  us  with 
the  consecrated  words. 

"  O  my  dear  Lallier  !  you,  the  companion  of  my  toils  and  weariness, 
you,  the  consoler  of  my  evil  days,  why  were  you  not  there  ?  I  would  have 
asked  you  to  place  your  signature  to  the  commemorative  deed  of  this  great 
fete.  I  would  have  presented  you  to  the  charming  bride  who  has  been  given 
to  me,  and  she  would  have  greeted  you  with  that  smile  of  hers  that  enchants 
every  one  ;  and  since  then,  during  those  few  days  that  we  have  been  together, 
what  calm,  what  serenity  reigns  in  that  soul  that  you  have  known  so  unquiet, 
so  ingenious  in  self-torture  !  I  let  myself  be  happy.  I  take  no  count  of  hours 
or  moments.  The  lapse  of  time  is  nothing  to  me.  What  do  I  care  about  the 
future  ?  Happiness  is  in  the  present — it  is  eternity.  ...  I  understand 
heaven  now, 

"  Help  me  to  be  good  and  grateful.  Each  day,  in  revealing  to  me  new 
perfections  in  her  whom  I  possess,  increases  my  debt  towards  Providence. 
.  .  .     What  a  difference  from  those  days  in  Paris  when  you  saw  me  so  sad ! 

"  I  am  almost  forgiven  for  having  shown  you  a  certain  letter  then  ;  I  shall 
be  forgiven  entirely  when  you  are  known  to  the  offended  person.  You  are 
invited  to  the  house-warming  in  the  month  of  November." 

"  My  happiness  is  great,"  he  writes  a  few  days  later  to  the  son  of  his  kind 
protector,  M.  Ampere;  " it  surjiasses  all  my  hop>es  and  dreams.  Since  the 
day  that  the  benediction  of  God  descended  on  me,  I  am  dwelling  in  a  sort  of 
enchanted  calm,  so  serene,  so  sweet  that  nothing  can  give  an  idea  of  it.  The 
angel  who  is  come  to  me  clothed  in  every  grace  and  virtue  is  like  a  new  reve- 
lation of  Providence  in  my  obscure  and  laborious  destiny  ;  I  am  illuminated 
with  interior  joy.  But  this  light,  which  fills  my  soul,  casts  no  shadows  over 
the  memories  of  the  past,  and  above  all  on  those  where  gratitude  plays  a  part. 
The  thought  of  you  was  present  to  me  amidst  those  friends  who  crowded 
round  me  at  the  foot  of  the  altar.  And  afterwards,  in  those  delightful  cod- 
versations  with  my  new  family,  who  like  to  hear  me  talk  over  bygone  yea.'s. 


t44  ^tf^  ^«^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

your  name,  like  that  of  your  venerated  father,  comes  up  at  every  instant,  and 
is  always  greeted  by  the  most  sincere  expressions  of  gratitude.  I  could  never 
express  mine  as  I  wished,  and  yet — I  know  you  will  forgive  me  for  saying  it — 
I  feel  almost  as  if  I  were  quits  with  you  when  I  hear  you  praised  by  those  lips 
whose  every  word  thrills  through  me." 

No  wonder  he  was  happy,  entering  as  he  did  on  the  mar- 
ried life  with  such  pure  aspirations,  such  a  lofty  idea  of  its 
duties  and  privileges.  Here  is  his  description  of  what  a 
Christian  marriage  should  be : 

**  In  marriage  there  is  not  only  a  contract,  there  is,  above  all,  a  sacrifice,  a 
twofold  sacrifice.  The  woman  sacrifices  that  which  God  has  given  her,  and 
which  is  irreparable,  that  which  was  the  object  of  her  mother's  anxious  care — 
herkfresh,  young  beauty,  often  her  health,  and  that  faculty  of  loving  which 
women  have  but  once.  The  man,  in  his  turn,  sacrifices  the  liberty  of  his 
youth,  those  incomparable  years  which  never  return,  that  power  of  devoting 
himself  to  her  he  loves,  which  is  only  to  be  found  at  the  outset  of  his  life,  and 
that  effort  of  a  first  love  to  secure  to  her  a  proud  and  happy  lot.  This  is  what 
a  man  can  do  but  once,  between  the  age  of  twenty  and  thirty — a  little  sooner, 
a  little  later,  perhaps  never.  This  is  why  I  say  that  Christian  marriage  is 
a  double  sacrifice.  It  is  two  cups  :  one  filled  with  virtue,  purity,  innocence  ; 
the  other  with  an  untainted  love,  self-devotion,  the  immortal  consecration  of 
the  man  to  her  who  is  weaker  than  himself,  who  was  unknown  to  him  yester- 
day, and  with  whom  to-day  he  is  content  to  spend  the  remainder  of  his  life  ; 
and  these  two  cups  must  both  be  full  to  the  brim,  in  order  that  the  union  may 
be  holy,  and  that  Heaven  may  bless  it."  * 

After  spending  a  month  in  the  Dauphine,  the  young 
married  couple  set  out  on  a  tour  through  Italy.  The  sacrifice 
of  a  portion  of  the  sum  set  aside  to  furnish  their  house  de- 
frayed the  expenses  of  the  journey.  It  was  a  little  rash,  per- 
haps, but  they  were  both  young  and  overflowing  with  trust  in 
the  future  and  in  one  another. 

"  Only  have  confidence  in  me,"  said  the  young  husband,  when  they  settled 
to  part  with  the  money  that  would  have  adorned  their  little  home,  "and  I 
will,  please  God,  before  long  give  you  the  prettiest  furniture  that  is  to 
be  had." 

They  travelled,  of  course,  with  the  utmost  simplicity,  but 
from  first  to  last  "  the  journey  was  like  an  enchanted  dream." 
They  loitered  longer  than  they  should  have  done  in  Sicily, 

•  Les  Fcmmes  Chretiennes.    Vide  Civilisation  au  s»t/  iikle,  vol.  ii.  p.  07. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  145 

fascinated  by  "  the  rich  African    nature,"   so  different  from 
anything  they  had  seen  elsewhere. 

♦•  A  real  tropical  vegetation  ;  the  fig-trees  of  Barbary  and  its  gigantic  aloes 
enclosing,  like  an  impenetrable  wall,  gardens  where  the  cotton-tree,  the  papy- 
rus, and  the  sugar-cane  grow  ;  terrestrial  paradises,  where  every  variety  of 
the  cedrate,  the  citron,  and  the  orange  clustered  luxuriantly  with  their  golden 
fruit ;  the  seashore  covered  with  little  palm-trees  ;  the  myrtle  and  oleander 
flowering  by  the  roadside  ;  while  here  and  there  the  tall  palm  rose  high  into 
the  air  with  its  crown  of  broad  leaves,  and  bunches  of  dates  suspended  from 
them.  All  this  hemmed  in  in  the  Strait  of  Messina,  at  the  foot  of  Etna,  with 
its  brow  of  snow,  in  that  gulf  of  Palermo  whose  wild  beauty  surpasses,  to  my 
idea,  all  the  boasted  beauties  of  Naples." 

But  what  interests  him  most  are  the  traces  of  Greek  and 
Roman  antiquity  that  he  finds  scattered  throughout  Sicily : 
the  empty  tombs,  the  ruined  temples,  the  fragments  of  marble 
gods,  pillars,  theatres,  baths — all  the  rich  and  varied  vestiges 
of  a  classical  past.  He  takes  volumes  of  notes  as  he  wan- 
ders through  the  silent,  solemn  ruins,  seeing  everywhere  "the 
grand  inspirations  of  genius  and  all  its  follies ;  the  progress 
of  art,  from  the  austere  nakedness  of  its  first  monuments  to 
the  somewhat  over-exuberant  decoration  of  its  latest."  He  is 
charmed  to  find  the  people  cherishing,  with  a  kind  of  filial 
worship,  this  precious  inheritance  of  the  past ;  to  find  also 
that  they  retain  the  old  faith  in  its  fervor,  and  the  primitive 
manners  of  their  fathers. 

*'One  evening,"  he  says,  in  a  letter  to  his  father-in-law,  "in  a  pretty  ham- 
let by  the  seashore,  when  the  Angelus  had  rung  for  the  churches  to  be  closed, 
we  saw  the  inhabitants  shut  their  doors  behind  them  and  go  off  in  procession 
to  salute  the  Blessed  Sacrament  with  a  last  homage.  Again  and  again  we 
have  met  with  the  most  patriarchal  hospitality  from  a  venerable  jjeasant  host 
in  passing  through  a  village  or  descending  from  our  litter.  We  have  been  sur- 
rounded and  compelled  to  enter  some  humble  dwelling,  where  they  would 
place  the  little  children  on  our  knees  to  get  a  kind  word  or  a  caress.  In  the 
monasteries  we  have  come  in  contact  with  eminent  and  excellent  men,  some- 
times with  an  amount  of  learning  that  confounded  me,  and  always  with  a  de- 
gree of  politeness  that  enchanted  Amelie.  She  will  always  remember  the 
Capuchins  of  Syracuse  and  the  Benedictines  of  Catania.  But  it  wouid  seem 
that  she  possesses,  above  all,  the  gift  of  charming  the  good  religious  of  St. 
Francis,  for  in  our  journey  from  Naples  to  Rome  she  was  the  object  of  the 
kindest  attentions  of  the  old  Procureur-GSniral  of  the  Observantines,  who 
ever  since  accosts  us  with  the  blandest  smile  in  his  long  white  beard.    Yester- 


146  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam 

day,  again,  at  San  Pietro,  in  Montorio,  a  Capuchin  of  whom  we  enquired  the 
way  offered  her  a  bouquet  of  roses.  In  fact,  it  would  be  enough  to  make  one 
tremble,  if  in  this  country  virtue  was  not  equal  to  courtesy." 

But  the  ten  days  which  the  travellers  passed  in  Rome  were 
the  crowning  joy  of  their  expedition.  What  they  achieved  in 
the  way  of  sight-seeing  and  visits,  besides  taking  notes  for 
future  use,  is  absolutely  incredible.  Everything  was  as  fresh 
a  wonder  to  Ozanam  as  if  it  had  been  his,  as  well  as  his 
young  bride's,  first  glimpse  of  the  Eternal  City.  He  is  filled 
with  pious  exultation  when  the  colossal  vision  of  St.  Peter's 
bursts  upon  them  as  they  approach  the  city  by  sea,  and  they 
behold  the  dome,  the  vast  and  wondrous  dome,  "like  the 
diadem  of  the  Papacy  suspended  between  heaven  and  earth." 
They  go  up  to  the  neighboring  hills  to  watch  the  sun  setting 
behind  the  neighboring  basilica,  and  it  appears  to  Ozanam  as 
"  the  emblem  of  that  institution  which  we  behold  ever  erect 
and  immovable  while  we  are  passing  on  the  waves  of  time, 
and  on  which  the  last  sun  of  humanity  will  set." 


CHAPTER  XV. 
1842. 

The  chair  to  which  Ozanam  was  named  was  one  which 
his  mental  and  moral  endowments  fitted  him  admirably  to 
fill.  It  was  the  realization,  moreover,  of  those  ambitions 
which  he  had  cherished,  like  the  presentiment  of  a  mission, 
and  for  whose  fulfilment  he  had  bten  preparing  himself  from 
his  early  boyhood. 

But  the  Professor's  fitness  for  his  post  did  not  obviate  the 
fact  that  it  was  one  of  peril,  beset  with  dangers  and  diflScul- 
ties. 

MM.  Guizot,  Villemain,  and  Cousin  had  for  some  years 
past  formed  a  triumvirate  of  genius  which  had  raised  the 
standard  of  professorships  at  the  Sorbonne  to  the  highest 
point  of  critical  severity;  it  was  therefore  a  tremendous 
ordeal  for  the  inexperienced  young  provincial  doctor  of  law  to 
be  brought  into  competition  with  such  rivals.  This  rivalry 
was  none  the  less  formidable  from  the  fact  that  the  three 
celebrated  masters  owed  no  small  portion  of  their  popularity 
and  oratorical  success  to  their  being  the  champions  of  a 
strong  political  opposition,  and  to  the  fact  that  with  them  the 
Professor's  chair  was  frequently  transformed  into  a  political 
tribune,  where  science  and  literature  disappeared  to  make 
way  for  theoretical  disquisitions  that  tickled  agreeably  the 
ears  of  a  socialist,  and  even  revolutionary,  audience.  But 
Ozanam,  even  if  he  had  not  been  too  humble  to  court  popu- 
larity for  its  own  sake,  was  far  too  scrupulous  to  have  conde- 
scended to  any  foils  or  arts  for  the  purpose.  He  was  bent 
solely  on  the  accomplishment  of  his  mission  as  a  teacher  of 
youth.  But  here,  at  least,  the  example  of  his  illustrious  col- 
leagues afforded  a  valuable   precedent;    it  justified  him   in 

»47 


J 


148  Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

using  his  rostrum  in  the  University  as  a  pulpit  for  the  propa- 
gation of  truth  through  the  medium  of  science,  poetry,  and 
history.  It  might  have  been  more  prudent  in  his  own  inter- 
est if  he  had  confined  himself  to  lecturing  on  these  subjects  in 
themselves,  instead  of  making  them  the  vehicle  of  Christian 
philosophy ;  but  personal  considerations  weighed  lightly  with 
Ozanam  against  the  dictates  of  duty.  He  remembered  his 
vow,  and  he  kept  to  it  as  the  stars  keep  to  their  course.  He 
knew  perfectly  that  in  adopting  this  conduct  he  was  com- 
mitting himself  to  a  manifestation  of  faith  which  would  in  all 
probabihty  cost  him  dear. 

The  times  were  excited ;  the  public  mind  was  envenomed 
against  religion,  or  liable  to  become  so  at  the  slightest  touch  ; 
reprisals  were  violent  and  prompt.  The  grand  question  of 
freedom  of  education  {la  liberti  d'' enseignement)  was  being 
hotly  contested  in  the  Press  and  the  Tribune.  M.  de  Monta- 
lembert,  the  chivalrous  captain  of  the  Catholics,  was  breaking 
lances  with  all  comers  in  the  cause  of  liberty,  charming  the 
chilly  souls  of  his  antique  brother  peers  by  the  spell  of  his 
eloquence,  and  firing  them  with  a  passhig  thrill  of  his  youth- 
ful enthusiasm.  All  who  would  fight  stood  armed  at  his  call, 
ready  to  follow  him  on  to  any  encounter.  There  were  divisions 
in  the  camp — as  when  have  th^re  not  been  ? — but  there  was 
not  a  single  traitor.  Ozanam,  from  his  peculiar  position,  was 
marked  out  to  a  post  in  the  advance-guard.  Montalembert 
had  called  him  a  brother-in-arms,  and  the  time  had  come  for 
him  to  vindicate  a  title  which  he  was  proud  to  bear. 

It  was  nearly  half  a  century  since  the  voice  of  a  Christian 
teacher,  a  teacher  identified  with  the  Christian  faith,  had  been 
^  heard  in  the  Sorbonne,  while,  on  the  other  hand,  its  walls  had 
echoed  unceasingly  to  every  false  and  fantastic  doctrine  of  the 
Voltairian  and  Rationalistic  schools ;  and  this  absence  of 
talent,  or  at  least  this  silence  among  the  Catholic  men  in  the 
'great  seat  of  learning,  went  far  to  sanction  the  popular  idea 
that  talent,  not  to  say  genius,  had  utterly  disappeared  from 
the  Catholic  ranks.     But  now  a  new  era  had  begun.    At  the 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  149 

age  of  seven-and-twenty  Ozanam  took  his  seat  amongst  the 
veterans  of  the  proud  old  University,  and  electrified  young 
and  old  by  the  splendor  of  his  gifts  and  the  burning  ardor  of 
his  faith.  It  was  a  strange  coincidence  that  the  same 
audience  which  so  lately  had  listened  with  deiigiit  while 
Villemain  and  Cousin  exposed  their  favorite  theses  should 
now  hear,  with  no  less  favor,  those  same  theses  energetically 
denounced  from  the  same  rostrum  by  the  daring  new-comer. 

It  was  a  rash  experiment  on  his  part.  The  State  as  yet 
held  the  monopoly  of  the  University,  and  looked  with  an 
evil  eye  on  the  men  who  were  leading  the  war  against  it 
in  behalf  of  the  rights  of  the  Church.  It  was  natural 
enough,  too,  that  an  assembly  of  young  men,  all  enlisted  in 
warm  partisanship  on  one  side  or  the  other,  but  amongst 
whom  the  opponents  of  the  Church  largely  predominated, 
should  form  a  dangerous  audience  for  a  Professor  of 
Ozanam's  ardent  religious  convictions.  But  he  did  not 
stop  to  calculate  risks ;  and  Fortune,  who  sides  mostly  with 
the  brave,  stood  by  the  young  champion  of  the  GospeL 
Here  was  no  sophist,  no  subtile  philosopher  striving  to 
palliate  hard  sayings,  or  smooth  down  unpalatable  propo- 
sitions, but  a  dauntless  knight,  who  rode  into  the  lists  with  his 
drawn  sword  flashing  in  the  sunlight,  and,  flinging  down  his 
gauntlet,  dared  all  comers  to  pick  it  up.  He  dealt  in  no 
compromise,  he  make  no  concessions  to  the  hostile  suscepti- 
bilities of  his  hearers.  The  sceptics  heard  him  in  astonished 
admiration,  the  Catholics  applauded  with  a  sense  of  victory. 
*'  Athens  listened,"  says  the  P^re  Lacordaire,  **  as  she  would 
have  listened  to  Gregory  or  Basil,  if,  instead  of  returning  to 
the  solitudes  of  their  native  land,  they  had  poured  out  at  the 
foot  of  the  Areopagus,  where  St.  Paul  was  preaching,  those 
treasures  of  science  and  taste  which  were  to  illustrate  their 
names." 

The  field  of  Ozanam's  new  labors  embraced  an  almost 
boundless  horizon,  for  it  was  not  a  question  of  initiating  his 
hearers   into   the   familiar   beauties  of  Greek   and    Roman 


15©  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

classics,  but  of  introducing  them  to  the  unknown  and  endless 
storehouses  of  foreign  literature — the  poets,  philosophers, 
historians,  writers  of  every  nation  who  have  enriched  their 
native  tongues  with  a  legacy  of  genius.  He  had  qualified 
himself  for  the  task  by  a  thorough  knowledge  of  modern  lan- 
guages and  literatures,  and  he  held  from  nature  that  gift  which 
is  the  crown  and  compendium  of  so  many  others — eloquence. 
Like  many  gifts  of  the  highest  order,  it  was  purchased  at  a 
price.  To  the  end  of  his  life  a  debut  was  always  a  painful 
ordeal  to  Ozanam.  It  did  not  matter  where  it  was,  in  the 
solemn  precincts  of  the  Sorbonne,  in  a  quiet  schoolroom,  in  a 
iete-a-iete  with  a  student,  or  in  a  drawing-room  circle,  so  long 
as  he  had  not  spoken  he  shrank  from  speaking.  He  would 
remain  an  entire  evening  listening  to  the  conversation  going 
on  around  him  without  ever  volunteering  a  remark  unless  it 
was  direcdy  elicited  ;  but  if  any  one  appealed  to  him  he  an- 
swered willingly,  at  first  with  a  certain  hesitation,  as  if  he  were 
looking  for  his  words,  but  after  a  few  sentences  the  dumb  de- 
mon was  exorcised,  and  his  conversation  flowed  on  in  a  clear 
and  brilliant  stream.  Nor  did  the  silence,  which  he  was  sure 
to  command  the  moment  he  began  to  talk,  intimidate,  but 
the  contrary :  it  stimulated  and  encouraged  him. 

The  same  effect  was  visible,  only  in  a  much  more  striking 
degree,  in  his  public  speaking.  Those  who  attended  his  lec- 
tures at  the  Sorbonne  continued  year  after  year  to  note  with 
wonder  the  distress  that  invariably  accompanied  the  opening 
sentences.  His  appearance,  as  he  ascended  the  rostrum,  be- 
trayed a  high  degree  of  nervous  agitation.  He  was  pale  al- 
most to  ghastliness ;  his  dark  eye  wandered  over  the  heads 
of  his  audience,  as  if  dreading  to  encounter  a  direct  glance; 
his  utterance  was  labored,  his  whole  manner  constrained. 
You  were  unconsciously  reminded  of  a  musician  trying  to 
master  an  indocile  instrument  whose  notes  refuse  their  office 
to  his  beseeching  fingers,  and  only  send  forth  broken  and  inar- 
ticulate sounds.  Tins  interval  never  failed,  but  it  was  of  short 
duration;  after  a  h\N  minutes  it  passed  away  swiftly  and  im- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  151 

perceptibly  ;  the  speaker  resumed  his  self-command,  emotion 
overcame  diffidence  and  burst  the  bonds  of  the  tongue-tied 
spirit;  his  eye  kindled,  and  met  responsive  glances  boldly; 
his  action,  always  simple,  grew  animated  and  expressive;  his 
voice  rang  out  in  full  and  thrilling  tones,  until  the  audience, 
wrought  to  sympathy  with  the  rising  flame,  caugiu  tire  at  it 
and  broke  out  into  short  but  irrepressible  bursts  of  applause. 
The  victory  once  gained,  the  orator  held  it  to  the  end,  rising 
to  loftier  flights  as  he  proceeded,  and  keeping  his  hearers  cap- 
tive to  the  close. 

If  we  except  this  passing  impediment,  resulting  in  a  great 
measure,  no  doubt,  from  a  weak  and  highly  nervous  physical 
temperament,  Ozanam  possessed  all  the  elements  of  the  purest 
eloquence — a  ready  and  retentive  memory,  a  clear  conception,  a 
facility  for  rigidly  sketching  the  outline  of  his  subject,  and  fill- 
ing it  up  in  strong,  brilliant,  and  delicate  colors.  Many  would 
have  been  dazzled  by  the  inheritance,  or  would  at  least  have 
remained  satisfied  with  so  ample  a  birthright,  and  spared 
themselves  the  toil  of  laborious  cultivation;  but  Ozanam 
worked  as  if  nature  had  denied  him  everything  but  the  facul- 
ty of  working.  The  gifts  he  held  from  the  gratuitous  bounty 
of  God  were  but  so  many  incentives  to  the  acquirement  of 
richer  and  greater  things  by  patient  and  persevering  labor. 
Nothing  better  illustrates  this  than  his  manner  of  preparing 
his  lectures.  Most  men,  feeling  themselves  thoroughly  mas- 
ter of  their  subject  from  long  previous  study,  would  have 
been  satisfied  with  rapidly  reviewing  it,  and  jotting  down  a 
few  notes  on  the  leading  points  to  be  treated.  But  Ozanam 
proceeded  differently.  On  the  evening  before  his  cours  he 
retired  early  to  his  study,  and  selecting  from  his  accumulat- 
ed materials  the  notes  and  texts  he  wanted,  he  proceeded  to 
classify  them  in  orderly  sequence.  This  done,  he  placed  his 
subject  before  him  and  meditated  on  it  until  the  central  idea 
clearly  disengaged  itself,  and  the  moral  truth  that  it  embod- 
ied stood  out  in  distinct  relief.  He  would  pass  long  hours  in 
this  solitary  and  direct  contemplation  of  the  beautiful  and  the 


152  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

true,  and  the  night  was  often  far  gone  when  an  anxious  voice 
broke  in  upon  his  musings.  Early  next  morning  he  would 
resume  the  interrupted  chain  of  thought,  and  then,  when  the 
time  came,  after  invoking  on  his  knees  the  Hght  and  aid  of 
the  Holy  Spirit,  he  went  forth  to  deliver  his  message. 

As  he  hurried  on  his  way  through  the  gardens  of  the  Lux- 
embourg, his  head  bent,  his  brow  still  contracted  in  deep 
thought,  you  might  have  taken  him  for  a  man  in  a  dream. 
Thus  it  was  that  the  savant  presented  himself  at  the  Sorbonne, 
and  ascended  his  chair  to  encounter  that  terrible  moment  of 
ajigoisse  which  we  have  described. 

His  manner  of  lecturing  was  full  of  charm ;  he  dispensed 
his  vast  erudition  with  the  simplicity  of  a  boy,  and  with  a 
prodigality  that  belongs  only  to  inexhaustible  abundance. 
Every  one  of  his  lectures  was  a  book  condensed  into  a  chap- 
ter, and  he  frequently  compressed  into  a  sentence  an  amount 
of  thought  and  information  which  a  mind  less  magnificently 
replenished  would  have  diluted  into  a  chapter,  telling  away 
in  an  hour,  like  the  intellectual  spendthrift  that  he  was,  the 
treasure  it  had  taken  years  to  accumulate.  He  stripped 
knowledge  of  half  its  difficulties  by  his  way  of  imparting  it. 
Knowledge  with  him  was  not  so  much  an  intellectual  system 
as  a  mental  habit,  which  had  become  a  part  of  his  being ;  he 
did  not  divest  himself  of  it,  as  some  men  do,  taking  it  up  and 
i'aying  it  down  at  stated  times ;  when  the  signal  came  for  him 
to  impart  it  officially,  he  did  not  seem  to  stand  up  and  per- 
form the  functions  of  a  Professor  so  much  as  to  avail  himself 
of  an  opportunity  for  reveahng  the  rich  deposit  of  thought, 
scientific  analysis,  and  observation  which  life-long  study  had 
left  in  his  mind ;  he  gave  it  out  naturally,  spontaneously,  and 
with  the  real  enthusiasm  of  a  devout  scholar,  devout  in  the 
sense  of  devoted;  his  devotion  to  science, ^nd  to  his  own 
particular  branch  of  it — history — partook  of  the  nature  of  his 
rehgion;  it  was  to  his  mind  what  faith  was  to  his  soul.  It 
was  the  spontaneity  of  his  method,  united  to  its  finished  art, 
which  exercised  such  fascination  on  all,  and  possessed  such 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  153 

an  unrivalled  power  of  attraction  for  the  young.  They  were 
interested  and  enchanted  even  before  they  were  convinced. 
If  they  arrived  at  the  lecture-hall  ignorant  of  the  subject  or 
indifferent  to  it,  tliey  were  quickly  excited  to  a  curiosity 
which  put  an  end  to  indifference  and  stimulated  to  enquiry 
and  investigation.  Few  minds  ever  possessed,  in  a  higher 
degree,  the  faculty  of  kindling  the  minds  of  others  with  his 
own — a  faculty  winch  may  be  taken  as  llie  supreme  test  of 
mental  and  moral  power.  Ozanam  followed  the  Socratic 
method,  of  which  he  had  learned  the  secret  from  M.  Noirot. 
Taking  hold  of  the  mind  on  every  side,  by  sympathy,  by  the 
reason  and  the  imagination,  he  compelled  the  student  to 
work  with  his  own  brains,  while  following  the  working  of 
another's. 

M.  Cousin  once  exclaimed,  on  coming  out  from  a  lecture 
of  Ozanam's,  "  The  Lyceums  and  Colleges  send  us  distin- 
guished Professors,  but  the  Abbe  Noirot  sends  us  men." 
Following  in  the  footsteps  of  his  venerable  master,  Ozanam 
strove,  above  all,  to  make  men  of  his  pupils,  to  impart  to 
them  his  own  manly,  vigorous  spirit  and  love  of  work.  No 
one  admired  fine  native  gifts  more  than  he  did ;  but  there 
was  something  that  he  prized  even  more  than  talent;  this 
was  industry,  energy — bonne  volonie\  as  he  termed  it.  He 
would  take  endless  pains  with  a  student  whom  he  saw  trying 
to  supplement  by  diligence  and  courage  a  nature  scantily 
endowed.  He  was  gentle,  even  respectful,  to  dulness,  as  he 
was  to  poverty  in  every  shape ;  and  it  sometimes  happened 
that,  under  his  fostering  influence,  those  who  had  utterly 
failed  with  other  masters  unexpectedly  developed  with  him 
latent  capacities  which  had  hitherto  remained  stubborn  and 
unproductive.  There  was  one  poor  lad  at  the  College  Stan- 
islas who  had  been  so  long  a  fixture  at  the  bottom  of  his 
class  that  the  masters  had  ceased  to  pay  any  attention  to  him, 
looking  upon  him  as  hopelessly  stupid.  Ozanam,  on  being 
appointed  Professor  at  the  College,  watched  the  boy  for  a 
time,  and  then  called  him  up  to  his  desk  one  day  and  encour- 


154  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanarn, 

aged  him  kindly,  taking  great  pains  to  make  liim  understand 
the  subject  of  the  lesson.  The  lad  was  so  touched  and  sur- 
prised  that,  when  Ozanam  was  gone,  he  sat  down  and  wrote 
to  thank  him,  assuring  him  his  kindness  should  not  be  lost. 
" /<?  vous  jure  que  je  ferai  V impossible  pour  vous  prouver  ma 
reconnaissance^'  he  said,  and  he  kept  his  word.  At  the  end  of 
the  year  he  carried  off  the  first  prize  at  the  Grand  Concours, 
and  at  the  present  moment  he  is  a  member  of  the  Academy. 
Nor  was  this  an  isolated  case.  Stanislas  stood  low  amongst 
the  Paris  colleges  when  Ozanam  was  named  Professor  of 
Rhetoric  there ;  none  of  its  pupils  had  ever  gained  a  single 
prize  at  the  Grand  Concours.*  The  first  year  of  his  profes- 
sorship they  carried  them  all  away,  and  the  number  of  pupils 
m  his  class  had  doubled.  He  had  contrived,  during  that 
short  time,  to  inspire  them  with  such  a  passion  for  study  that 
many,  of  their  own  free  impulse,  asked  permission  to  double 
their  year  of  rhetoric.  The  pupils  loved  him  almost  to 
idolatry.  When  he  appeared  amongst  them  for  the  first 
time  he  said,  "  I  shall  never  punish  you ;  I  mean  to  treat  you 
as  ggen,  to  do  my  best  for  you,  and  to  trust  to  your  doing  the 
same.  If  you  do  not  agree  to  this,  if  you  behave  like  gamins^ 
I  will  not  lose  my  time  with  you."  They  took  him  at  his 
word.  During  the  eighteen  months  that  he  remained  their 
Professor,  he  never  had  so  much  as  to  call  one  of  the  boys  to 
order.  Their  respect  showed  itself  in  a  reserve  not  common 
to  schoolboys :  they  never  laughed  at  him.  One  morning, 
when  he  was  suffering  severely  from  toothache,  he  entered 
the  room  with  a  cap  pulled  down  over  his  ears ;  one  of  the 
boys  tittered,  and  made  some  joke  at  the  master's  expense ; 
he  was  immediately  seized  and  hustled  out  of  the  class  before 
Ozanam  was  aware  of  any  disturbance.  No  man  in  his 
position  was  ever  so  much  beloved  in  Paris ;  it  was  almost  an 
adoration.  After  hanging  upon  his  lips  at  the  Sorbonne, 
bursting  out  every  now  and  then  as  if  in  spite  of  themselves 
into  sudden  gusts  of  applause,  and  then  hushing  one  another 

•  The  Grand  Concours  ic  r.  yearly  competition  between  all  the  first  colleges  in  Paris. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederk  Ozanatn.  155 

for  fear  they  should  lose  one  of  the  master's  words,  his  young 
audience  would  follow  him  out  of  the  lecture-hall,  shouting 
and  cheering,  putting  questions,  and  elbowing  their  way  up 
for  a  word  of  recognition,  while  a  band  of  favored  ones 
irooped  on  with  him  to  his  home  across  the  gardens.  They 
never  suspected  what  an  additional  fatigue  this  affectionate 
demonstration  was  to  the  Professor,  already  exhausted  by  the 
preceding  hour  and  a  halfs  exertion,  with  its  laborious  proxi- 
mate preparation.  No  matter  how  tired  he  was,  they  were 
never  dismissed;  he  welcomed  their  noisy  company,  with  its 
eager  talk,  its  comments  and  questions,  as  if  it  were  the  most 
refreshing  rest.  There  was,  indeed,  only  one  reward  that 
Ozanam  coveted  more;  this  was  when  some  young  soul,  who 
had  come  to  the  lecture  in  doubt  or  unbelief,  suddenly  moved 
by  the  orator's  exposition  of  the  faith,  as  it  was  embodied  or 
shadowed  forth  in  his  subject,  opened  his  eyes  to  the  truth, 
and,  like  the  blind  man  in  the  Gospel,  cried  out,  "  giving 
thanks." 

One  day,  on  coming  home  from  the  Sorbonne,  the  follow- 
ing note  was  handed  to  him : 

**  It  is  impossible  that  any  one  could  speak  with  so  much  fervor  and  heart 
without  believing  what  he  affirms ;  if  it  be  any  satisfaction,  I  will  even  say 
happiness,  to  you  to  know  it,  enjoy  it  to  the  full,  and  learn  that  before  hearing 
you  1  did  not  believe.  What  a  great  number  of  sermons  failed  to  do  for  me, 
you  have  done  in  an  hour  :  you  have  made  me  a  Christian  I  .  ,  .  Accept  this 
expression  of  my  joy  and  gratitude." 

You  have  made  me  a  Christian  /  Oh  !  let  those  who  believe 
and  love  like  Ozanam  tell  us  what  he  felt,  what  joy  inundated 
his  soul  when  this  cry  went  forth  to  him, 

He  loved  the  young,  and  had  the  secret  of  gaining  their 
fullest  confidence.  The  students  came  to  him  in  all  their 
troubles,  consulted  him  about  their  studies,  about  everything 
in  which  they  wanted  direction,  and  he  gave  himself  up  to 
them  as  if  it  was  his  most  important  business.  He  saw  them 
every  morning  from  eight  to  ten,  except  on  the  day  of  his 
courSj  and  for  these  two  hours  the  room  adjoining  his  study 
was  besieged  as  if  it  had  been  the  ante-chamber  of  a  minister. 


156  Life  afid  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

He  never  hurried  the  most  tiresome  lad  away,  no  matter  how 
busy  he  was  or  how  inopportunely  the  visitor  had  interrupted 
his  own  important  work. 

It  has  been  said  with  truth  that  Ozanam  himself  was  never 
young;  that  he  was  a  man  from  liis  childhood,  aged  prema- 
turely by  anxiety,  thought,  and  study ;  it  is  certain  that,  as  a 
friend  who  had  known  him  from  childhood  said,  "  he  had 
no  youth  in  the  stormy  sense  of  the  word  " ;  but  it  is  equally 
true  in  another  sense  that  he  remained  always  young — young 
in  sympathy  with  the  ideal  aspirations,  the  ardent  efforts,  the 
bright  dreams,  the  high  resolves  and  enthusiasms  which  con- 
stitute the  glory  of  the  vision  of  youth  and  its  loveHest  pre- 
rogative. All  this  Ozanam  held  to  the  last.  He  had  seen 
some  of  his  own  dreams  vanish  and  his  hopes  denied,  but 
when  he  beheld  a  young  spirit  standing  on  the  shore  of  Hfe, 
and  taking  wing  for  its  seductive  visionary  flights,  his  heart 
beat  high  in  responsive  pulses ;  he  was  never  the  one  to  chiH 
by  the  cold  smile  of  experience  the  faith  of  the  young  pilgrim 
in  his  fair  vision  of  hope.  What  if  he  soared  too  high  at  first, 
and  fell,  ruffling  and  bruising  his  wings  in  the  descent  ?  It 
was  better  than  never  to  have  risen — better  than  to  remain 
crawling  on  the  low,  safe  level  of  selfish  aims  and  narrow  inte- 
rests and  ignoble  pleasures.  Faith  in  the  ideal  was  too  strong 
with  Ozanam  for  the  experiences  of  life,  however  disappoint- 
ing, to  destroy  it. 

His  letters  to  his  family  prove  better  than  anything  how 
earnestly  he  had  at  heart  the  Professor's  duties  which  were 
now  his  life's  vocation. 


TO   M.    SOULACROIX. 

•*  January  27,  1842. 
"  I  have  resumed  my  class,  and  although  the  subject  begun  last  year  is  now- 
more  restricted,  more  special  and  less  attractive,  the  audience  continues  as- 
siduous ;  always  numerous  and  well-disposed. 

*'  But  the  fuss  of  our  arrival,  the  multiplicity  of  visits,  the  things  that  must 
be  seen  to,  a  few  articles  for  the  newspapers,  have  not  left  me  the  necessary 
/eisure  to  occupy  myself  with  writing  a  book. 

"  Many  of  my  hindrances  arise  from  the  actual  condition  of  science  and 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  157 

thought  in  our  time.  Nowadays  the  progress  of  historical  and  literary  science 
has  led  them  to  proceed  like  mathematical  and  natural  sciences  ;  they  isolate 
themselves  in  their  special  sphere,  they  create  a  technical  language  for  them- 
selves, and,  being  thus  inaccessible  except  to  the  small  number  of  the  initiated, 
they  cease  to  be  popular.  Hence  it  follows  that  books  and  lectures  which  are 
accessible  to  the  generality  of  enlightened  minds  acquire  no  consideration 
amongst  a  certain  class  of  men,  whose  works,  in  their  turn,  dishearten  general 
readers  by  the  severity  of  their  form.  Assuredly,  with  genius  one  would  know 
how  to  avoid  both  the  pedantry  of  the  learned  and  the  superficial  mediocrity 
of  the  vulgar  ;  but  genius  is  a  rare  and  supreme  gift  which  God  bestows  once 
or  twice  in  a  century,  and  which  has  not  been  lavished  in  the  present  one. 
For  myself,  I  have  almost  always  found  that  my  best  and  happiest  works  have 
been  the  least  enjoyed  by  men  of  the  guild. 

•'  My  class  has  had  precisely  the  advantage  of  collecting  a  great  number  of 
hearers,  and  consequently  being  accessible  to  them,  without  at  the  same  time 
failing  in  the  gravity  due  to  a  special  theme.  Nevertheless,  amongst  the  many 
weighty  personages  who  have  followed  it,  no  one  has  advised  me  to  publish 
my  lectures  simply  revised  from  the  stenographer.  Besides,  as  I  touched  upon 
many  questions  that  are  hotly  contested  in  Germany,  a  book  on  this  subject, 
in  order  to  be  strong  and  weighty,  would  exact  an  immense  amount  of  verifi- 
cation. Criticism  has  a  much  firmer  hold  upon  written  than  spoken  words ; 
it  is  also  doubtful  whether  if  in  France,  where  purely  literary  questions  excite 
but  feeble  interest,  a  book  on  German  literature  in  the  middle  ages  would 
meet  with  any  great  popularity.  Several  persons  whom  I  consulted,  especially 
M.  Mignet  and  M.  Ampere,  have  advised  me  to  choose  for  the  theme  of  my 
lectures  something  less  general,  an  episode,  so  to  speak,  which  would  be  more 
restricted,  so  that  I  might  treat  it  thoroughly,  and  thus  satisfy  the  more  exact- 
ing judges  ;  at  the  same  time,  it  should  have  a  general  and  positive  interest, 
in  order  to  attract  favor  from  the  wider  public.  1  think  I  have  hit  upon  these 
very  conditions  in  some  lectures  of  last  year — the  best,  perhaps,  I  have  ever 
given — on  the  Holy  Roman  Empire  of  the  middle  ages.  The  empire,  the 
universal  monarchy  of  Christian  times,  as  the  genius  of  Charlemagne  con- 
ceived and  his  successors  imp>erfectly  realized  it,  developed  in  the  public  law, 
in  the  philosophy  and  the  p)oetry  of  the  twelfth,  thirteenth,  and  fourteenth 
centuries,  engaging  in  a  struggle  with  the  Pap>acy,  falling  in  the  struggle,  and 
leaving  behind  it  nothing  but  a  German  empire  dwindled  at  the  present  day 
to  the  proportions  of  an  Austrian  one. 

"  It  is  not  the  history  of  the  facts  in  detail ;  it  is  above  all  the  philosophical 
history  of  the  institution,  such  as  the  German  writers  represent  it,  that  I  find 
stamped  with  this  idea.  A  work  like  this,  which  has  never  yet  been  written, 
would  throw  great  light  on  the  general  affairs  of  old  Europe.  It  would  dis- 
cover to  the  world  the  causes  of  the  fall  of  Italy  and  the  greatness  of  France  ; 
there  would  be  room  in  it  for  the  most  celebrated  personages  of  those  times : 
Gregory  VII.,  Innocent  IV.,  Frederic  Barbarossa,  Rodolph  of  Hapsbui^,  The 
gjeat  doctors,  jurists,  and  poets  would  figure  on  the  scene  as  witnesses,  and 
thither  all  my  studies  would  converge,  only  remanipulated  and  put  into 
action." 


y 


15^  J^iffi  and  IVorks  of  F?eiieric  Ozanatn. 

K\  the  close  of  the  scholastic  year  he  thus  relates  his  own 
impressions  of  its  results : 

TO   LALLIER. 

^^  August  17,  1842. 

"  It  ffias  only  at  the  close  of  my  lectures  that  the  serious  interest  of  the 
subject  revealed  itself  to  me  distinctly.  It  is  a  case  of  proving  that  Germany 
owes  her  genius  and  her  whole  civilization  to  the  Christian  education  she  re- 
ceived ;  that  her  greatness  was  in  proportion  to  her  union  with  Christendom  ; 
that  she  drew  her  power,  her  light,  her  poetry,  from  her  fraternal  connections 
with  the  other  nations  of  Europe  ;  that  for  her,  as  for  others,  there  is,  there 
can  be,  no  real  destiny  except  through  Roman  unity,  the  depository  of  the 
temporal  traditions  of  humanity,  as  well  as  of  the  eternal  designs  of  Provi- 
dence. All  this  looks  simple,  natural,  almost  trivial  in  its  self-evident  truth 
this  side  of  the  Rhine  ;  but.  on  the  other  hand,  the  national  pride  plumes 
itself  in  dreams  of  an  autochthonous  civilization  from  which  Christianity  has, 
by  the  way,  caused  them  to  decline  ;  in  a  literature  which,  without  contact 
with  the  Latin,  would  have  developed  into  unexampled  splendor  ;  in  a  future, 
in  fact,  which  promises  to  be  magnificent,  provided  it  steeps  itself  in  unmixed 
and  unalloyed  Teutonism.  The  German  type  is  no  longer  Charlemagne,  but 
Arminius. 

' '  These  doctrines  pierce  in  divers  forms  through  the  various  philosophical, 
historical,  and  literary  schools,  from  Hegel  to  Goethe,  from  Goethe  to  Strauss. 
It  seems  to  me  advisable  to  attack  them  at  home,  on  their  own  ground  ;  to 
show  how  alone  they  were  simply  barbarians  ;  how,  thanks  to  their  bishops, 
their  monks,  to  the  Roman  faith,  the  Roman  language,  the  Roman  law,  they 
entered  into  possession  of  the  religious,  scientific,  and  political  inheritance  of 
modern  nations  ;  how  in  repudiating  it  they  fell  back  gradually  into  bar- 
barism. An  introduction  which  will  precede  and  conclusions  that  will  follow 
the  history  of  the  literature  of  German  chivalry,  the  principal  object  of  my 
book,  will,  I  hope,  bring  out  this  idea  in  strong  relief. 

*'  I  am  occupied  at  present  with  the  introduction.  My  former  lectures  are 
of  very  little  use  to  me  for  this  chapter,  whose  importance  I  discovered  rather 
late.  I  have  had  to  make  immense  researches — Germany  under  the  Romans, 
its  military  institutions,  municipal  organization,  schools  ;  the  first  preaching 
of  Christianity  before  the  invasion  of  the  barbarians ;  the  action  of  the 
Church  in  presence  of  and  after  the  invaision  ;  the  formation  of  the  State,  the 
empire  on  one  hand,  the  towns  on  the  other ;  lastly,  the  preservation  and 
propagation  of  letters  ;  the  uninterrupted  teaching  of  the  languages  and  arts 
of  antiquity  ;  the  admirable  works  achieved  in  the  monasteries  of  Fulda  and 
of  St.  Gall  become  the  schools  of  Germany. 

*'  In  the  absence  of  general  treatises,  I  had  to  hunt  through  particular  histo- 
ries, through  the  lives  of  saints  and  the  chronicles  of  the  towns.  I  think  I 
have  discovered  unknown  and  conclusive  facts,  which  will  establish  the  perpe- 
tuity of  the  learned  tradition,  in  an  epoch  that  we  are  accustomed  to  hear 
branded  with  the  name  of  barbarous,  from  Charles  Martel  to  the  Crusades,  I 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Gzanam.  159 

am  going  to  put  this  into  shape  (it  will  extend  to  about  two  hundred  and  fifty 
pages),  and  I  will  print  a  portion  of  it  in  the  Correspondant  in  order  to  elicit 
some  good  advice." 

TO   HIS     BROTHER    CHARLES. 

"  To-day  is  Sunday.  We  are  in  a  little  palace  with  a  garden  on  the  edge 
of  the  Luxembourg,  whose  green  alleys  form  a  delightful  prospect  from  our 
windows.  This  abode  was  built  for  Murat,  brother-in-law  of  the  Emperor 
and  King  of  Naples  ;  it  came  later  on  into  the  hands  of  the  Prince  de  Clermont 
Tonnerre  ;  from  one  fall  to  another  it  fell  finally  into  the  possession  of  M. 
Bailly,  who  has  kindly  allowed  us  to  take  up  our  residence  here  during  the 
great  heat. 

*'  I  remember  that  Alphonse  must  by  this  have  left  Lyons,  that  you  are 
alone,  and  that  consequently  a  little  brotherly  visit  will  not  come  amiss  to 
you.  And  this  reminds  me,  my  dear  boy,  that  we  must  strengthen  our  mind 
and  our  heart  so  as  not  to  be  afraid  of  solitude  and  not  to  give  way  to  those 
temptations  to  melancholy  which  are  sure  to  assail  us  in  it.  You  will  soon 
be  eighteen  ;  at  this  age  I  had  to  leave  all — for  in  those  days  we  had  all  to 
leave — and  to  come  away  here,  where  I  had  not,  like  you,  a  brother  and  many 
friends.  Instead  of  that  I  had  a  lonely  room,  books  that  had  no  memories  for 
me,  strange  laces  everywhere  around  me. 

'•  For  you,  whatever  God's  will  may  be,  wheresoever  your  vocation  may  lead 
you,  you  will  find  a  brother  who  will  be  a  guide  and  a  support  to  you  ;  you 
will  find  the  wav  oreoared  for  you,  a  circle  of  friends,  many  less  dangers 
awaiting  you.  You  are  in  one  of  those  periods  of  life  when  all  the  faculties 
take  a  rapid  development ;  we  feel-ourselves  growing  and  maturing.  If  1  were 
near  you,  I  would  try  and  be  of  use  to  you  ;  I  would  perhaps  help  to  clear 
away  your  doubts,  to  direct  your  reading.  It  is  a  great  pleasure  to  philoso- 
phize. Only  yesterday  I  spent  more  than  an  hour  and  a  half  discussing  the 
ideas  of  Plato  with  a  friend.  If  you  wrote  to  me  fully  on  certain  difficult 
points,  I  would  try  and  answer  them  by  long  and  full  explanations  ;  but  you 
will  do  better  to  talk  them  over  with  your  fellow-students,  some  of  whom  have 
great  ability  and  experience.  As  to  your  reading,  the  most  modern  works 
may  prove  useful  if  you  use  them  under  proper  guidance.  Read  Descartes 
and  Malbranche ;  I  told  you  to  get  Mr.  Dugald  Stewart's  Moral  Philosophy. 
You  will  lie  sure  not  to  neglect  the  history  of  philosophy,  without  which  any 
other  science  is  of  small  account. 

"These  coming  holidays,  if  you  have  not  taken  your  bachelor's  degree,  I 
may  be  of  greater  use  to  you.  You  are  beginning  to  find  out  what  a  hard  life 
a  young  man  has  of  it.  Formerly  it  was  the  war,  now  it  is  the  examinations. 
Certainly  there  are  seasons  of  hard  work  that  are  as  good  as  a  ramp>aign.  In 
1837,  for  five  months  1  worked  regularly  ten  hours  a  day,  without  counting  the 
classes,  and  fourteen  or  fifteen  the  last  month.  One  has  to  be  prudent  so  as 
not  to  injure  one's  health  by  the  pressure,  but,  little  by  little,  the  constitution 
grows  used  to  it ;  we  become  accustomed  to  a  severe  active  life,  and  it  benefits 
the  temper  as  much  as  the  intellect. 


i6o  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

**  Adieu,  my  dear  Charles.  My  love  to  our  old  Marie.  I  congratulate  her 
on  her  famous  health  ;  they  tell  me  she  comes  and  goes  and  does  wonders." 

This  furore  of  work,  which  Ozanam  here  describes  as  a 
thing  of  the  past,  continued  almost  to  the  same  extent  in  his 
present  life. 

♦*  Beware,"  M.  Victor  le  Clerc  would  say  to  him  during  the  first  year  of  his 
cours  ;  •'  moderate  the  ardor  of  this  verve  that  carries  you  away  ;  be  always 
an  orator,  but  be  more  calm.  This  ardent,  impassioned  utterance  that  breaks 
forth  after  prolonged  meditation,  this  enthusiasm  that  you  cannot  master 
and  that  masters  you,  is  a  source  of  uneasiness  to  your  friends.  Think  of  the 
future  ;  we  want  you  not  to  curtail  any  fraction  of  that  future  which  is  due  to 
you  ;  we  desire  it  for  you  and  for  ourselves." 

His  cours  and  his  literary  work  were  not  the  only  calls  upon 
his  time  and  energy.  He  was  continually  appealed  to  from 
one  side  and  the  other  to  speak  in  charitable  assemblies  and 
at  working-men's  meetings,  and  he  never  refused.  He  pre- 
sided at  a  literary  conference  for  many  years,  and  directed  the 
studies  of  a  number  of  young  men  who,  thanks  to  his  enlight- 
ened guidance,  have  since  risen  to  eminence.  It  was  no  vain 
flourish  of  rhetoric,  but  the  sincere  promptings  of  his  heart, 
that  dictated  the  following  words,  addressed  one  evening  to 
an  assembly  of  young  men  at  the  Cercle  Catholique : 

"Every  day  our  friends,  our  brothers,  are  killed  as  soldiers  or  missionaries 
on  the  soil  of  Africa  or  before  the  palaces  of  the  mandarins.  What  are  we 
doing  meanwhile  ?  Seriously,  do  you  imagine  that  God  has  appointed  for 
some  to  die  in  the  service  of  civilization  and  the  Church  while  others  walk 
about  with  their  hands  in  their  pockets,  or  lie  down  on  roses  ?  O  gentle- 
men !  you,  toilers  of  science,  and  you.  Christian  men  of  letters,  let  us  prove 
one  and  all  that  we  are  not  cowardly  enough  to  believe  in  a  division  which 
would  be  an  accusation  against  God  who  would  have  made  it,  and  an  ignominy 
on  us  who  would  accept  it.  Let  us  be  ready  to  prove  that  we  too  have  our 
battle-fields,  and  that,  if  need  be,  we  can  die  on  them:' 

He  did  prove  it  when  the  time  came.  Meantime,  the  work 
that  he  accomplished  in  his  sphere  will  never  be  known  in 
this  world.  God  only  knows  the  harvest  that  others  have 
reaped  from  his  prodigal  self-devotion,  his  knowledge,  and 
that  eloquence  which  so  fully  illustrated  the  ideal  standard 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  i6i 

of  human  speech  described  by  Fenelon  as  "  the  strong  and 
persuasive  utterance  of  a  soul  nobly  inspired."  For  Ozanam 
was  not  merely  a  teacher  in  the  Sorbonne;  he  was  a  teacher 
of  the  world,  and  his  influence  shone  out  to  the  world  through 
the  minds  and  lives  of  numbers  of  his  contemporaries  who  did 
not  know  that  they  were  reflecting  his  light. 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

1843-44. 

The  year  1843  was  one  of  fruitful  activity  in  the  Christian 
camp.  The  question  of  the  freedom  of  the  schools,  which 
had  subsided  after  the  condemnation  of  the  Avenir^  had  now- 
sprung  up  again,  and  was  being  agitated  with  greater  vehe- 
mence than  ever.  M.  de  Montalembert  had  given  it  a  new 
impulse  by  his  pamphlet  on  the  "  Duty  of  Catholics  in  the 
Question  of  Free  Education,"  which  appeared  just  as  he  was 
inaugurating  his  career  as  a  political  orator  from  the  Tribune 
of  the  Chamber  of  Peers.  The  Correspondant,  after  many  vi- 
cissitudes, had  emerged  from  troubled  waters,  and  was  start- 
ing in  a  new  career,  which  the  names  of  its  contributors 
promised  to  render  brilliant.  Montalembert  himself  headed 
the  list,  and  then  followed  a  long  array  of  writers,  each  well 
known  in  his  line — MM.  de  Falloux,  Ozanam,  Veuillot,  de 
Champagny,  Audley,  etc. 

This  same  year  the  Cercle  CathoHque  was  founded,  under 
the  patronage  of  Monseigneur  Affre  and  many  distinguished 
laymen.  Its  object  was  to  create  a  centre  for  Catholic  young 
men  coming  to  Paris  for  their  studies.  A  library  was  formed, 
and  lectures  were  given  on  literary  and  scientific  subjects. 
Ozanam  presided  over  the  literary  conference,  and  frequently 
spoke  himself.  The  Pere  Lacordaire,  who  had  returned  from 
Italy  with  heightened  prestige  and  a  more  matured  genius, 
went  there  from  time  to  time.  M.  de  Montalembert,  the  P^re 
de  Ravignan,  the  Abbe  Bautain,  whose  magnificent  conferences 
at  Strasbourg,  exposing  the  danger  of  separating  abstract 
philosophy  from  the  supernatural  lights  of  revelation,  had  ex- 
cited such  wide  notice,  all  came  in  turn  to  contribute  to  the 
instruction  and  entertainment  of  the  Cercle  Catholique. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.^  163 

A  strong  intellectual  current  was  flowing  through  the 
Catholic  youth  of  that  time,  turning  their  minds  to  many 
vital  questions,  such  as  the  union  of  faith  and  science,  the  al- 
liance of  religion  and  liberty,  the  emancipation  of  the  Church 
from  all  oppressive  responsibility  to  the  State.  They  were  in- 
tensely interested  in  the  philosophy  of  history,  and  in  no  por- 
tion of  it  more  than  that  most  misunderstood  and  calumniated 
of  epochs,  the  Middle  Ages.  It  was  no  uncommon  thing  to 
see  one  of  these  young  students  devoting  his  leisure  to  hunt- 
ing out  the  authenticity  of  a  breviary,  or  the  solution  of  some 
disputed  point  concerning  the  notation  of  music  in  the  thir- 
teenth century.  Art  and  science  absorbed  them  far  more  than 
politics. 

Ozanam  exercised  a  decisive  influence  at  the  Cercle  in  all 
artistic  questions.  Few,  indeed,  were  more  competent  to  in- 
terpret the  true  mission  of  art,  its  beautiful  faculty  of  express- 
ing faith  and  love,  of  "translating  the  emotions  of  the  soul  and 
the  inspirations  of  genius  by  outward  symbols  and  material 
signs,  while,  at  the  same  time,  his  erudition  was  as  inexhausti- 
ble on  all  subjects  pertaining  to  art  as  if  he  had  made  this  his 
sole  study.  It  sometimes  happened  that  a  young  man  who 
had  spent  a  week  at  the  Royal  Library  wading  through  vene- 
rable folios  for  information  on  some  obscure  point,  or  about 
some  comparatively  unknown  painter  or  sculptor,  was  aston- 
ished to  hear  the  President,  to  whom  he  applied  for  an  opin- 
ion, sum  up,  in  a  {q^^  rapid  sentences,  ten  times  the  information 
he  had  obtained  in  his  week's  digging. 

In  this  first  year  of  its  existence  Ozanam  made  a 
speech  at  the  Cercle  Catholique  which  was  an  event.  The 
subject  was  the  literary  duties  of  Christians.  It  was  one 
in  which  many  leading  Catholics  of  the  day  felt  person- 
ally concerned,  and  it  required  to  be  handled  with  great 
delicacy,  so  as  not  to  inflict  wounds  where  the  speaker's  ob- 
ject was  to  heal  them.  The  Archbishop  of  Paris  was 
present,  knowing  beforehand  that  Ozanam  was  to  speak, 
and  on  what  subject,  and  his  presence  on  this  day  was  in- 


164  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

tended  as  a  public  mark  of  adhesion.  After  dilating  on  the 
advance  of  science  through  faith,  the  impossibility  of  acquir- 
ing true  science  without  orthodoxy,  and  the  duty  of  making 
art  the  vehicle  of  faith  to  humanity,  the  orator  came  to  speak 
of  the  mission  of  the  controversialist. 

'•  If,"  he  says,  "  the  rules  of  Christian  controversy  have  been  defined  and 
imposed,  it  is  not  permitted  to  violate  them  with  impunity.  In  the  heat  of  the 
fight  there  is  a  danger  that  we  do  not  think  of.  It  is  easy  to  offend  God.  The 
violent  instincts  of  human  nature,  restrained  by  Christianity,  break  loose  and 
manifest  themselves  here.  .  .  .  Tertullian,  carried  away  by  the  African  im- 
petuosity of  his  genius,  pursued  with  the  same  animosity  the  false  gods  and 
the  weak  Christians  who  sacrificed  to  them  ;  he  refused  to  receive  them  back 
to  the  reconciliation  promised  to  repentance  ;  he  would  not  forgive  the  Church 
for  pardoning  them ;  and  ended  by  apostatizing  out  of  hatred  of  apostasy. 
In  the  quarrels  of  Arianism  the  invectives  of  Lucifer  di  Cagliari  broke  forth 
like  thunder ;  he  remained  inflexible  to  the  scandal  of  the  Council  of  Rimini, 
but  when  the  penitent  bishops  were  taken  back  into  communion  with  Rome, 
he  separated  from  her  rather  than  share  that  communion  with  them.  .  .  . 

"Discussion  has  other  dangers  for  those  whom  it  is  striving  to  convince. 
Assuredly,  when  Christians  embark  on  the  painful  service  of  controversy,  it  is 
with  the  firm  will  to  serve  God  and  to  gain  the  hearts  of  men.  We  must  not, 
therefore,  compromise  the  holiness  of  the  cause  by  the  violence  of  the  means. 
Pascal  understood  this,  and  says  somewhere  :  '  The  way  of  God,  who  does 
all  things  gently,  is  to  put  religion  into  the  mind  by  reason  and  into  the  heart 
by  grace.  .  .  .  Begin  by  pitying  the  unbeliever ;  he  is  already  wretched 
enough.  .  .  .'" 

Then,  calling  to  witness  the  examples  of  the  Fathers  of  the 
Church,  Ozanam  goes  on  to  quote  the  conduct  of  St.  Basil 
keeping  up  a  touching  correspondence  with  the  sophist  Liba- 
nius,  surrounding  his  old  pagan  master  with  the  filial  piety  of 
a  disciple,  and  never  despairing  of  him ;  St.  Augustine  faith- 
fully pursuing  his  faint-hearted  friend  Licentius ;  then  he  con- 
tinues : 

"We  must  never  begin  by  despairing  of  those  who  deny.  It  is  not  a  ques- 
tion of  mortifying  but  of  convincing  them.  Refutation  is  humiliation  enough 
for  them,  when  it  is  conclusive.  Whatever  be  the  disloyalty  or  the  brutality 
of  their  attacks,  let  us  show  them  the  example  of  a  generous  controversy. 
Let  us  beware  of  exasperating  their  pride  by  abuse,  and  let  us  not  drive  them 
to  damn  themselves  rather  than  retract.  The  number  of  those  who  doubt  is 
greater  still.  There  are  noble  minds  who  are  led  astray  by  the  vices  of  early 
education,  or  by  the  force  of  evil  example.  Many  of  them  feel  bitterly  the 
Ijajsery  of  their  unbelief.     We  owe  them  a  compassion  which  need  not  e^- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  165 

elude  esteem.  It  would  be  politic,  even  if  it  were  not  just,  rot  to  thrust 
them  back  into  the  lessening  crowd  of  impious  unbelievers,  to  distinguish 
their  cause,  and  not  to  confound  strangers  with  enemies.  .  .  .  There  aresome 
who,  after  having  waited  a  little  while  for  these  tardy  ones,  lose  patience,  and 
grow  irritated  with  their  slowness.  Let  us  not  lose  patience.  God  is  patient 
because  he  is  eternal ;  so  likewise  are  Christians." 

It  is  hard  to  see  how  words  so  full 'of  the  wisdom  of  Chris- 
tian charity  should  have  provoked  anger  and  resentment,  and 
drawn  down  on  the  speaker  that  "  abuse  "  from  which  he  so 
gently  adjures  them  to  refrain  towards  their  enemies.  Yet  so 
it  was.  A  fierce  article  on  this  portion  of  the  speech  ap- 
peared next  morning  in  the  Univers. 

The  following  letter  gives  us  Ozanam 's  estimate  of  the  at- 
tack : 

"  I  seize  a  moment  of  leisure  to  send  you  these  few  lines  with  the  Bulletin 
du  Cercle  Cat/tolique,  in  which  you  will  find  a  speech  by  the  present  writer  on 
the  Literary  Duties  o/ Christians  *  and  the  Archbishop's  allocution  in  answer 
to  it.  I  was  sending  it  about  to  our  friends  also,  by  way  of  justification  against 
a  violent  attack  of  the  Univers.  I  allude  to  an  article  which  appeared  on  the 
Feast  of  the  Ascension,  entitled  Moderation  and  Zeal,  in  which  I  was  stigma- 
tized as  a  deserter  from  the  Catholic  struggle.  It  was  a  reply  of  that  journal's 
to  my  speech,  not  a  word  of  which  was  addressed  to  it.  They  have  apologized 
to  me  ;  but  I  had  reason  to  fear  that  my  friends  at  Lyons  were  somewhat 
alarmed  about  me,  and  this  is  why  I  send  you  the  documents  connected  with 
the  whole  affair.  You  will  see  therein  that  the  Cercle  Catholique  invited  me 
to  speak  at  an  important  meeting  where  Monseigneur  AfTre  presided.  In  ac- 
cepting this  honor,  I  consulted  his  Grace  beforehand,  and  he  specially  entreated 
me  to  dwell  upon  certain  questions  concerning  which  he  appeared  glad  to 
have  an  opportunity  of  publicly  explaining  himself.  The  greater  portion  of 
the  clergy  of  Paris  highly  disapprove  of  the  passion  and  violence  by  which 
certain  newspapers  and  pamphlets  are  compromising  the  cause  of  the  Church. 
The  entire  assembly  applauded  my  remarks,  and  those  which  the  Archbishop 
added  to  them  consoled  and  fortified  the  general  opinion.  A  few  days  after- 
wards a  speech  of  M.  de  Game's  in  the  same  strain  induced  the  Cham- 
ber of  Deputies  to  send  up  the  petitions  to  the  Minister.  Earnest  thought 
and  serious  discussion  will  end,  thank  God,  by  carrying  the  day  against  these 
polemics  of  abuse  and  furj',  which  are  more  suited  to  our  enemies  than  to  us. 

"You  must  not  suppose,  however,  that  in  the  difficulties  of  our  present  po- 
sition we  have  hard  words  for  none  but  the  imprudent  champions  of  truth.  I 
am  doing  my  best,  and  that  is  but  little,  in  concert  with  M.  Lenormant,  M. 
Coeur,  and  a  few  others,  to  maintain  a  vigorous  struggle  against  the  doctrines 
of  the  Professors  of  the  College  of  France.     While  MM.  Michelet  ard  Quinet 

•  See  CompUt4  Work*  qfOtanam^  vol.  vii.  p.  147. 


i66  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

vrere  attacking  Christianity  itself  under  the  name  of  Jesuitism,  I  tried  in  three 
consecutive  lectures  to  defend  the  Papacy,  monks,  and  monastic  obedience. 
I  did  this  in  presence  of  a  very  large  audience,  who  were  stamping  and  hiss- 
ing somewhere  else  the  day  before  ;  and  yet  I  met  with  no  interruption  or 
disturbance,  and  in  continuing  the  literary  history  of  Italy — that  is  to  say,  of 
one  of  the  most  Christian  countries  that  exist  under  the  sun — I  met  at  every 
step,  and  I  shall  take  every  opportunity  of  pointing  out  in  the  course  of  my 
lectures,  the  benefits  and  the  prodigies  of  the  Church, 

"  Help  me  by  your  prayers  ;  ask  for  me  the  spirit  of  strength  and  know- 
ledge, which  the  whole  of  Christendom  is  imploring  on  bended  knees  during 
these  Whitsuntide  solemnities." 

"  Of  all  the  gifts  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  that  which  we  need  most  is  strength,^ 
he  says  elsewhere  to  M.  Foisset ;  "and  we  know  so  little  what  it  means 
that  many  fancy  they  have  got  it  because  they  have  violence  and  passion, 
which  are,  on  the  contrary,  like  all  that  is  convulsive,  proofs  of  uneasiness  and 
weakness." 

This  spirit  of  strength  was,  above  all,  desirable  at  a  crisis 
when  angry  discussion  tended  to  produce  that  dissension 
which  is  the  most  fatal  element  of  weakness. 

'•  You  want  to  know  if  the  Catholics  in  Paris  are  united,"  he  says ;  "I  be- 
lieve they  were  never  more  united  as  to  the  end,  but  never  more  divided  as  to 
the  means.  It  is  easy  for  you  to  follow  from  a  distance  the  movements  and 
divisions  of  the  fighting  army.  .  .  .  Amongst  the  foremost  in  the  battle 
you  will  perceive  the  enfans  perdus  of  the  Untvers,  whom  everybody  disowns, 
either  because  of  its  violence  or  its  want  of  talent." 

Ozanam's  zeal  was,  indeed,  held  in  check  by  a  degree  of 
prudence  and  far-seeing  sagacity  rare  in  one  so  inexperienced. 

"  My  fear  always  is,"  he  writes,  "  that  the  Catholic  questions  may  have  been 
raised  too  soon,  and  before  our  number,  our  influence,  and  our  works  have 
put  us  in  a  position  to  maintain  the  struggle.  I  am  frightened  lest  laymen 
without  grace  d''etaty  without  authority,  may  have  incurred  the  fearful  respon- 
sibility of  drawing  the  Church  of  France  into  a  crisis  whose  issue  it  is  impos- 
sible to  foresee.  But,  being  once  inevitably  drawn  into  it,  and  public  opinion 
being  taken  hold  of,  when  the  exaggeration,  the  violence,  and  the  gross  igno- 
rance of  certain  writers  had  compromised  the  Catholic  interests  of  which  they 
made  themselves  the  organs,  I  rejoiced  to  see  the  controversy  lifted  out  of 
this  wretched  skirmishing,  and  replaced  on  its  proper  level  by  M.  de  Monta- 
lembert,  in  the  first  instance,  and  after  him  by  M.  de  Came,  M.  de  Vatim^nil, 
Pere  de  Ravienan,  and  our  venerable  prelates,  notably  the  Archbishops  of 
Paris  and  Lyons.  These  are  the  true  representatives  of  our  rights — the  ones 
we  run  no  risk  of  ever  having  to  disown.  Here  it  is  no  longer  a  quarrel  of 
pedagogues  and  beadles ;  it  is  not  even  a  discussion  between  the  colleges  and 
the  Uttle  seminaries :  it  is  the  grand  cjuestion  of  the  relations  between  Church 


Life  and  Work:^  of  Frcdenc  Czaiiam.  167 

and  State,  the  Priesthood  and  the  Empire,  which  is  never  terminated,  but  re- 
appears at  all  the  most  eventful  epochs  of  history— in  the  age  of  the  Fathers, 
the  age  of  the  Crusades,  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.,  the  age  of  Napoleon.  It  is 
being  stirred  up  now  between  statesmen  and  churchmen,  and  may  compel  the 
former  to  study  religion  and  the  latter  to  practise  liberty  ;  it  may  completely 
detach  the  clergy  from  those  traditions  of  absolutism  to  which  they  still  cling  ; 
it  may  stir  the  country  deeply  ;  it  is  right  that  a  great  people  should  be  occu- 
pied with  great  things. 

"  We  must  not,  however,  blind  ourselves  to  the  peril.  Religious  ignorance 
is  so  complete  and  prejudice  so  strong,  and  we  have  so  few  men  who  are  capa- 
ble of  winning  over  public  opinion  to  our  side  !  Who  knows  ?  This  prema- 
ture effort  may  give  rise  to  a  terrible  reaction,  may  provoke  an  irruption  of 
Voltairianism,  and  the  faith  of  a  great  number  may  perish  I  But  at  the  point 
that  things  have  now  reached  it  behooves  us  to  stifle  these  fears  and  to  hold 
on  together,  united,  and  resolved  to  conquer  or  die  with  honor.  Last  year  it 
was  still  possible  to  postf>one  the  battle ;  but  now  any  attempt  at  temporiza- 
tion  would  only  serve  to  divide  our  forces.  We  must  follow  the  inevitable 
course  of  men  and  things,  and  trust  to  God  who  is  leading  it,  holding  our- 
selves ready  for  every  sacrifice,  with  the  certainty  that  if  they  do  not  avail 
for  the  success  of  the  struggle  now  they  will  have  their  prize  sooner  or  later, 
in  this  world  or  the  next ;  remembering  that  when  we  are  most  inclined  to 
think  our  efforts,  our  time,  and  our  trouble  lost.  Providence  may  be  drawing 
from  them  a  far  greater  good  than  we  dream  of." 

While  Ozanam  was  carrying  on  the  warfare  in  his  own  field 
he  was  bravely  seconded  by  M.  Lenormant,  who  occupied  the 
chair  of  M.  Guizot  as  assistant  Professor  of  History. 

The  conquest  of  this  distinguished  man  to  Christianity  was 
of  recent  date.  For  three  years  he  had  been  undergoing  a 
fierce  inward  struggle,  whose  final  issue  was  awaited  with  in- 
tense interest  by  many  who  were  watching  the  event  with 
widely  divergent  sympathies.  There  are  few  things  more  im- 
pressive and  exciting  than  the  spectacle  of  a  human  con- 
science wrestling  with  itself,  and,  with  the  self-forgetting 
simplicity  of  real  earnestness,  admitting  others  to  witness  the 
struggle,  casting  aside  false  shame,  making  no  secret  of  its 
doubts,  its  faltering  modification  of  convictions,  and  the 
gradual  ingress  of  light,  until  at  last  the  fulness  of  truth  illu- 
minates the  darkness  and  the  triumph  of  faith  is  complete. 
M.  Lenormant  had  been  affording  this  wonderful  spectacle  to 
all  who  had  attended  his  cours  for  the  last  three  years.  He 
had  come  before  them  as  a  sceptic  and  had  addressed  them 


l68  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

as  such ;  but  the  moment  his  disbehef  was  shaken  his  con- 
science was  too  honest  to  go  on  feigning  a  tone  of  negative 
conviction  he  no  longer  felt.  He  did  not  hide  that  his  philo- 
sophical creed  was  staggered.  He  dissembled  neither  his  ir-  * 
resolution  nor  his  own  surprise  at  it.  At  last  a  day  came 
when  the  battle  was  over,  and  victory  declared  itself  on  the 
side  of  faith.  The  event  was  greeted  by  the  young  popula- 
tion of  the  Sorbonne  with  mingled  delight  and  indignation. 
But  the  indignation  largely  predominated.  M.  Lenormant  at 
once  followed  up  his  conversion  to  Christianity  by  publicly 
vindicating  and  exalting  what  he  had  formerly  denounced, 
and  denouncing  what  he  had  exalted. 

This  conduct,  as  was  to  be  expected,  provoked  general 
hostihty  amongst  the  anti-Christian  majority,  and  the  cours  of 
the  savaftt^  lately  so  popular,  became  the  scene  of  hostile  and 
riotous  demonstrations.  The  same  intolerant  apostles  of 
tolerance  were  clamoring  furiously  at  the  cours  of  M.  Dupan- 
loup,  where  they  would  not  allow  the  Professor  to  speak  ac- 
cording to  his  conscience  of  Voltaire,  the  man  who,  of  all 
others,  had  used  the  most  reckless  license  in  speaking  of  men 
and  things.  Older  and  cooler  heads  were  inciting  and  direct- 
ing these  young  fanatics  in  their  proceedings.  MM.  Miche- 
let  and  Quinet  resented  Lenormant's  conversion  as  a  personal 
insult,  although  "  the  convert  of  the  Sorbonne,"  as  they  de- 
risively termed  him,  had  scrupulously  avoided  attacking,  or 
even  indirectly  refuting,  the  diatribes  of  the  too  revolutionary 
tribunes  of  the  College  de  France.  They,  however,  deter- 
mined to  leave  nothing  undone  to  silence  him,  and  their 
influence  gave  a  serious  color  to  a  movement  which  otherwise 
might  have  passed  off  as  a  mere  college  ebullition.  Ozanam 
saw  at  once  the  gravity  of  the  situation.  He  made  a  point 
of  attending  M.  Lenormant's  lectures  whenever  he  could, 
and  his  sagacity  soon  took  in  the  drift  and  motive  of  the  tur- 
bulent scenes  that  were  enacted  there. 

"I  can  assure  you,"  he  says  to  Lallier,  "it  is  no  mere  uprising  of  the 
SchoolSvno  fanatical  onset  of  a  troop  of  hot-headed  boys.    It  is  d.  great  deal 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  169 

more  and  a  jjreat  deal  less.  It  is  an  affair  got  up  without  passion,  but  with 
I>erfidious  cunning,  in  the  bureaux  of  a  few  revolutionary  newspapers,  in 
order  to  maintain  the  irreligious  portion  of  the  public  in  the  kind  of  fever  it 
has  been  in  these  last  few  years,  and  also  to  create  new  difficulties  in  the  way 
of  the  Government.  As  these  people  have  all  the  obstinacy  of  a  parti  pris, 
and  cLS  the  Government  is  as  weak  as  it  always  is  when  called  upon  to  take  the 
part  of  religion,  there  is  reason  to  fear  the  rows  will  be  repeated,  and  though 
there  be  only,  like  the  last  time,  sixty  rioters,  if  they  return  to  the  charge  ten 
times  they  will  end  by  getting  the  cours  shut  up.  At  any  rate,  it  will  not  be 
done  without  energetic  protestations ;  for  the  Catholic  youth  have  shown 
more  than  usual  firmness  in  this  matter,  which  will  at  least  have  the  effect  of 
drawing  their  ranks  closer  and  strengthening  them  for  the  contest. 

"  But  you  can  imagine  what  a  grief  it  is  to  me  to  see  a  cours  so  able  and 
so  salutary  in  its  doctrines  imperilled  by  such  miserable  intrigues,  and  be- 
trayed by  those  whose  duty  it  is  to  defend,  there  as  elsewhere,  the  cause  of 
public  order. 

"  Alas  1  my  dear  friend,  what  an  amount  of  harm  is  done  in  the  world 
through  the  inconsistency  and  faintheartedness  of  good  people  !  For  my 
part,  I  shall  do  my  best  to  prevent  my  cause  being  separated  from  that  of 
Lenormant.  So  long  as  his  lectures  are  disturbed  I  shall  continue  to  attend 
them,  and  use  all  my  influence  with  a  certain  number  of  young  men  to  re- 
cruit the  audience.  If  you  were  here  you  would  help  us  by  your  presence  and 
your  advice.  Sustain  us  at  least  in  the  distance  by  your  prayers.  It  is  on 
Thursday,  the  8th,  that  the  cours  is  to  be  resumed." 

It  was  as  Ozanam  feared.  The  recommencing  of  the  lec- 
tures was  the  signal  for  the  renewal  of  the  hostile  demonstra- 
tions. M.  Lenormant's  appearance  was  greeted  with  hisses 
and  yells  and  unseemly  manifestations  of  dislike.  He  began 
to  speak,  but  his  voice  was  drowned  in  hootings  and  blas- 
phemous cries.  Ozanam,  who  was  present,  unable  to  contain 
his  indignation,  leaped  up  beside  the  lecturer  and  stood  for  a 
moment  surveying  the  tumult  with  proud  defiance.  The 
courageous  action  drew  forth  an  instantaneous  salvo  of  ap- 
plause; but  Ozanam,  with  a  scornful  gesture,  commanded 
silence,  and  proceeded  to  tell  the  assembly  what  he  thought 
of  their  behavior,  and  what  value  he  set  on  their  plaudits ;  he 
spoke  with  a  fiery  vehemence  that  startled  all  into  attention ; 
he  adjured  them  in  the  name  of  liberty,  which  they  so  loudly 
invoked,  to  respect  Hberty  in  others,  and  to  allow  every  man 
the  freedom  of  his  conscience.  The  effect  of  the  harangue 
was  magical ;    the  tumult  ceased,  and   M.   Lenormant  con- 


170  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

tinued,  or  rather  began,  his  lecture,  and  finished  it  without 
interruption.  The  next  day,  however,  the  cours  was  closed 
by  order  of  the  Government — authority  thus  yielding  to  vio- 
lence, where  by  a  little  firmness  it  might  so  easily  have  taken 
the  upper  hand  and  constituted  itself  the  guardian  of  social 
peace  and  the  bulwark  of  social  principles. 

This  cowardly  and  cruel  precedent  did  not  daunt  Ozanam, 
or  induce  him  to  abate  one  iota  of  his  independence;  he  con- 
tinued his  lectures  without  mitigating  in  the  slightest  degree 
the  out-and-out  Christian  tone  of  his  teaching.  The  boldness 
of  this  conduct,  while  it  heightened  his  prestige  with  his  own 
party,  increased  his  general  popularity.  His  name  became  a 
power  in  its  sphere,  and  was  cited  everywhere  as  an  example 
of  the  energy  and  growing  strength  of  the  Catholics. 

It  once  happened,  during  the  noisy  days  of  the  Lenor- 
mant  riots,  when  the  learned  Sorbonne  was  transformed  into 
a  battle-field,  that  some  person,  meaning  to  be  witty,  scratched 
out  the  words  "  litterature  etrangere "  after  Ozanam's  name 
on  the  door,  and  wrote  over  them,  "  theologie."  He  was  in- 
formed of  it  as  he  was  entering  the  hall.  He  said  nothing 
until  he  had  finished  his  lecture,  and  then,  as  he  was  about  to 
descend  from  his  chair,  he  observed,  in  a  tone  of  great  dig- 
nity ;  "  I  have  not  the  honor  to  be  a  theologian,  gentlemen, 
but  I  have  the  happiness  to  believe,  and  the  ambition  to  place 
my  whole  soul  with  all  my  might  at  the  service  of  truth." 

The  courageous  profession  of  faith  was  greeted  by  loud 
and  general  cheers. 

It  was,  in  truth,  a  position  to  the  full  as  perilous  as  it  was 
glorious  which  he  now  occupied,  and  one  which  demanded 
no  ordinary  combination  of  wisdom,  tact,  and  courage  in 
order  to  reconcile  personal  dignity  and  interest  with  the  stern 
dictates  of  principle.  For  he  had  become  the  standard-bearer 
of  the  Christian  cause  in  the  sphere  where  he  had  been  the 
first  to  introduce  it,  and  he  was  now  the  central  object  of 
attack  from  its  enemies.  The  fate  of  his  colleague  was  a 
warning  whose  significance  he  could  not  misunderstand.     His 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  171 

own  popularity  might  seem  to  offer  a  guarantee  for  his 
safety ;  but  the  firmest  popularity  is  at  best  but  a  throne  built 
upon  sand,  which  a  sudden  gust  of  wind  in  the  shape  of  a 
revulsion  of  public  feeling  may  upset  at  a  moment's  warning. 
If  he  opened  a  direct  attack  on  the  Sorbonne,  it  was  tanta- 
mount to  giving  up  his  chair;  and  his  chair  was  his  bread — 
tliat  blessed  panem  quoiidiamitn  which  represents  peace  of 
mind,  the  one  earthly  ambition  Ozanam  had  ever  deliberately 
cherished.  And  now  he  was  not  alone :  he  had  a  wife  and 
child  to  guard  it  for.  Moreover,  to  resign  would  be  to 
desert  his  post,  and  leave  the  field  open  on  every  side  to  the 
enemy. 

The  old  Sorbonne,  too,  claimed  some  allegiance  from  him 
as  from  a  favorite  son,  on  whose  young  head  she  had  lavished 
high  honors  prematurely.  He  was  the  Benjamin  of  the  gray 
old  Alma  Mater,  and  his  heart  went  out  to  her  with  dutiful 
affection.  All  the  manliness  and  loyalty  of  his  nature  re- 
coiled from  striking  her.  His  position  was  a  Gordian  knot 
which  seemingly  nothing  but  a  fatal  stroke  could  sever,  fatal 
whichever  way  it  fell.  Seemingly,  but  not  in  reality.  P6re 
Lacordaire,  whose  judgment  on  Ozanara's  conduct  through- 
out this  critical  time  may  be  taken  as  conclusive,  observes :  ♦ 


*'  It  is  seldom  that  in  the  most  delicate  position,  when  everything  seems  im- 
possible, there  is  not  some  point  which  reconciles  all  things,  just  as  in  God 
attributes  which  look  most  dissimilar  meet  somewhere  in  the  harmony  of  a 
perfect  unity.  Ozanam  retained  his  professorship ;  it  was  his  post  in  the 
danger.  He  did  not  directly  attack  the  body  to  which  he  belonged  ;  this  was 
his  duty  as  a  colleague,  and  he  was  bound  to  it  in  gratitude.  But  he  con- 
tinued in  the  most  complete  and  avowed  solidarity  with  us—  I  mean,  though  I 
have  no  right  to  count  myself  amongst  them,  with  those  who  were  defending 
with  all  their  heart  the  sacred  cause  of  freedom  of  education.  No  tie  that 
bound  him  to  chiefs  or  soldiers  was  loosened.  He  took  his  part  in  all  the 
meetings,  all  the  works,  all  the  inspirations  of  the  time,  and  what  he  did  not 
officially  enunciate  in  his  chair  or  in  his  writings,  his  influence  proclaimed 
with  a  boldness  that  was  more  than  a  confession.  Nor  did  a  shadow  of  mis- 
trust or  coldness  ever  cast  a  cloud  for  one  moment  on  the  high  rank  that  he 
occupied  amongst  us.     He  preserved  undiminished  the  affection  of  the  Catho- 

*  CEuvrts  du  F.  Lacordaire— Otanam,  vol.  v.  p.  404. 


172  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

lies,  the  esteem  of  the  body  to  which  he  belonged,  and,  outside  these  two 
camps,  the  sympathy  of  that  floating,  fitful  crowd,  the  public,  which  sooner  or 
later  decides  all  things." 

Ozanam 's  great  and  universal  popularity  is  a  matter  of  sur- 
prise to  many  who  hear  of  it  only  from  a  distance  and  cannot 
penetrate  its  secret.  It  is  difficult  to  appreciate  this  fragile 
possession  without  being  apparently  guilty  of  exaggerated  and 
dubious  estimates. 

Popularity,  as  it  is  vulgarly  understood,  is  a  worthless  thing, 
but  in  its  true  and  higher  sense  it  is  a  noble  privilege.  To  be 
popular  means  to  be  loved  not  by  a  few  but  by  many,  by  the 
multitude.  It  is  the  empire  of  one  soul  over  the  souls  of  num- 
bers, an  empire  which,  if  rightly  used,  represents  the  noblest 
power  any  mortal  hand  can  wield.  It  seldom  falls  to  the 
hand  that  tries  to  clutch  it.  It  may  come  for  a  moment,  gild- 
ing life  like  a  flitting  sunbeam,  but  it  quickly  passes  away, 
leaving  a  chiller  darkness  behind.  Ozanam  never  courted 
popularity  ;  perhaps  no  man  holding  a  public  post  ever  sought 
it  less.  When  it  found  him  out  he  only  valued  it  inasmuch  as 
it  helped  him  to  make  popular  the  doctrines  that  he  taught. 
This  very  obliteration  of  self  no  doubt  drew  the  public  favor 
to  him  unconsciously.  Then  his  faith  was  in  itself  a  power. 
Men  delight  in  the  sight  of  enthusiasm  and  strong  conviction, 
even  when  they  do  not  share  them.  A  faith  of  any  sort  is  a 
power.  Sceptics,  who  do  not  believe  in  belief,  envy  those 
who  do.  A  man  who  represents  the  most  unpopular  convic- 
tion, who  serves  it  and  stands  by  it  through  thick  and  thin,  is 
sure  to  gain  influence  in  the  long  run.  Undying  devotion 
to  a  cause  eventually  conquers  the  respect  of  its  enemies, 
though  it  may  not  make  its  champion  popular.  The  qualities 
of  the  man  himself  must  do  this.  He  must  have  a  heart,  or 
Ije  must  pass  for  having  one.  Ozanam  was  essentially  a  man 
of  heart.  His  genius  excited  admiration,  his  piety  com- 
manded respect,  but  it  was  his  kindness  that  made  him  loved. 
Lacordaire  says  that  he  had  a  charm  '*  which,  added  to  his 
other  gifts,  completed  in  his  person  the  artisan  of  a  predes- 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  173 

lined  enchantment.  He  was  gentle  to  all  men  and  just 
towards  error." 

Just  towards  error !  What  a  gospel  of  charity  is  com- 
pressed into  the  words !  Ozanam  denied  to  no  man  freedom 
of  thought,  the  right  to  differ  from  him.  Moreover,  he  be- 
lieved all  his  life  that  the  majority  of  sceptics  were  ready  to 
embrace  truth,  could  they  only  be  induced  to  hear  it  explained. 
This  is  why  he  strove  so  humbly  to  make  his  own  exposition 
of  it  attractive  and  persuasive.  He  had  intense  pity  for  un- 
believers, looking  upon  them  not  as  wilfully  blind  or  as  crimi- 
nal, but  as  brothers  who,  for  some  unknown  cause,  had  been 
denied  that  blessed  inheritance  of  faith  which  illuminated  his 
own  life,  and  the  sense  of  gratitude  and  of  his  own  unworthi- 
ness  made  him  merciful.  His  extraordinary  indulgence 
towards  error  was  sometimes  a  stumbling-block  to  his  friends 
when  they  were  all  young  together;  but  there  is  not  one  of 
them  now  who,  on  looking  back,  does  not  recognize  that  Oza- 
nam's  faith  was  all  the  more  powerful  for  being  so  sweetly 
tempered  by  charity.  To  youth,  especially,  his  tolerance  was 
almost  boundless ;  yet  no  one  will  dare  to  say  that  there  was 
the  faintest  touch  of  cowardice  or  false  liberality  in  this  con- 
descension towards  intellectual  error.  "  It  was,"  as  M.  Am- 
pere very  justly  observes,  "a  largeness  of  view  which  taught 
him  to  recognize  sympathies  outside  the  camp  where  he  was 
fighting."  It  was  also  a  deep  reverence  for  souls  which 
taught  him  to  respect  the  mysterious  relationship  between 
God  and  his  creatures — a  tender  humility  which  forbade  him 
to  sit  in  judgment  on  others,  or  to  quench  the  smoking  flax. 

He  frequently  pointed  to  M.  Lenormant  as  an  example  of 
the  triumph  of  grace  in  a  soul  that  was  loyal  in  its  intention 
to  serve  the  truth,  even  while  actively  attacking  it,  and  he 
would  warn  his  Catholic  friends  of  the  danger  of  repelling 
others  in  similar  circumstances  by  harshness  and  unjust  judg- 
ments. This  terror  of  alienating  a  seeker  after  truth  made 
him  extremely  gentle  in  dealing  with  an  adversary.  He  al- 
ways said  that  a  man  wlio  began  to  examine  religious  doctrine 


174  i-^f^  ^nd  Works  of  Prederic  Ozanani, 

should  be  treated  with  respect,  because  the  moment  a  soul  set 
out  to  seek  God — that  is  to  say,  truth — he  was  on  the  road 
towards  him.  He  resented  bitterness  in  religious  discussion 
as  an  act  of  trespass  to  the  faith,  whose  chief  commandment 
is  "That  ye  love  one  another."  No  controversial  triumph 
was  worth  anything  in  his  eyes  if  it  was  purchased  at  the  cost 
of  charity  or  a  violation  of  "  the  peace  of  love."  In  the 
eleven  volumes  which  he  has  left  us,  and  which  deal  with  a 
variety  of  controversial  subjects,  his  lash  is  always  raised 
against  falsehood,  injustice,  and  vice,  but  there  is  not  one  line 
that  is  cruel  or  harsh  to  individuals.  There  is  nowhere  the 
least  trace  of  pique,  or  revenge,  or  anger;  he  holds  the  scep- 
tre of  truth  with  a  steady  hand,  but  never  strikes  with  it  except 
at  falsehood.  He  pleads  far  more  than  he  condemns,  and  his 
denunciations  breathe  more  compassion  than  wrath. 

The  same  large  spirit  of  universal  charity  presided  over  his 
almsgiving  and  all  his  dealings  with  the  poor.  He  made  no 
invidious  distinctions  as  to  creed.  Wherever  there  was  naked- 
ness to  be  clothed,  tears  to  be  wiped  away,  a  soul  to  be  com- 
forted, he  recognized  a  claim  and  answered  it.  The  Abb6 
Perreyve  tells  a  touching  anecdote  which  proves  this  better 
than  a  volume  of  description.  A  Protestant  congregation  in 
Paris  collected  a  sum  of  money  for  charitable  purposes  and 
gave  it  to  their  clergyman,  who,  having  no  pressing  cases  of 
distress  at  the  moment,  was  embarrassed  as  to  how  he  should 
best  apply  it.  He  knew  Ozanam  by  reputation,  and  the  idea 
occurred  to  him  that  he  would  be  the  likeliest  person  to  know 
how  to  employ  the  money ;  so,  acting  on  the  generous  inspi- 
ration, lie  took  it  to  him  and  requested  him  to  use  it  according 
to  his  judgment.  We  can  fancy  how  touched  Frederic's  heart 
was  by  the  delicate  proof  of  confidence.  He  carried  the 
offering  the  same  evening  to  a  conference  of  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul,  and  related  the  incident  with  an  emotion  which  spread 
to  all  present.  One  member,  however,  rose,  and,  after  prais- 
ing warmly  the  disinterested  charity  of  their  Protestant  bene- 
factor, suggested  that  the  money  should  be  first  applied  to 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanant.  17  J 

relieving  the  Catholic  poor,  who  were  more  numerous,  and 
then  that  the  surplus  should  be  given  to  some  indigent  Pro- 
testant families. 

*'As  he  proceeded,"  says  the  Abbe  Perreyve,  "I  saw  Ozanam's  features 
contracting  impatiently,  and  I  guessed,  by  the  tremulous  movement  of  his 
hand  as  he  drew  it  nervously  through  his  long  hair,  that  we  were  about  to  wit- 
ness one  of  those  explosions  which  he  could  not  control.  '  Gentlemen,'  he 
said,  starting  to  his  feet  when  the  speaker  had  finished,  '  if  this  proposal  had 
the  misfortune  to  prevail — if  it  be  not  distinctly  understood  that  our  members 
succor  the  poor  without  reference  to  creed  or  country — I  shall  this  moment  re- 
turn to  the  Protestants  the  alms  they  have  entrusted  to  me,  and  I  shall  say : 
Take  it  back  ;  we  are  not  worthy  of  your  confidence  I '" . 

We  are  not  much  surprised  when  the  Abb6  adds:  "They 
did  not  put  it  to  the  vote." 

But,  if  he  was  intolerant  of  intolerance,  Ozanam  had  an 
unmitigated,  almost  violent,  horror  of  evil  in  itself.  The  sight 
of  vice  or  falsehood  excited  him  as  a  personal  wrong  excites 
most  of  us.  He  resented  it  with  a  fierceness  very  foreign  to 
his  gentle  nature;  and  yet,  with  all  this,  his  pity  for  the  of- 
fender never  failed. 

•'Often,"  says  the  Abbe  Perreyve,  **on  hearing  any  one  say  of  a  person 
whose  life  was  steeped  in  wickedness,  ♦  He  is  a  lost  man  ! '  Ozanam  would  re- 
mark :  '  After  all,  if  it  be  true  that  God  has  His  own  secret,  as  I  believe,  we 
may  rest  assured  it  is  a  secret  of  mercy.'  " 

The  service  of  the  poor  occupies  such  a  prominent  position 
in  Ozanam's  life  that  it  becomes  of  interest  to  know  how  he 
performed  it.  It  was  essentially  a  service  of  love.  His  man- 
ner towards  the  poor  was  considerate  and  deferential  as 
towards  his  equals.  He  invariably  took  off  his  hat  on  enter- 
ing their  poor  abodes,  greeting  them  with  his  courteous 
formula,  "  I  am  your  servant."  He  never  preached  to  them ; 
after  giving  whatever  he  had  to  give,  he  would  sit  and  chat 
on  any  subject  likely  to  cheer  or  interest  them.  When  they 
came  to  see  him  they  were  not  kept  in  the  hall,  but  were 
shown  into  his  study,  where  he  would  draw  forward  a  com- 
fortable chair,  and  behave  in  every  way  as  towards  visitors 
whom  he  was  glad  to  honor.     At  Christmas  he  always  took 


176  Life  and  Works  of  Prederic  Ozanam. 

them  some  little  present — a  book,  a  picture,  or  some  trifle  he 
knew  they  fancied.  One  New  Year's  Eve  he  was  telling  his 
wife  about  a  poor  family  who  had  known  better  days,  but 
were  now  reduced  to  such  shifts  that  they  had  been  compelled 
to  pledge  a  handsome  chest  of  drawers,  the  last  remnant  that 
remained  to  them  of  former  comfort.  He  said  he  was  greatly 
tempted  to  go  and  redeem  it  and  send  it  to  them  for  their 
New  Year's  gift.  His  Amelie  was  seldom  inclined  to  check 
his  generous  impulses,  but  she  felt  it  right  to  show  certain 
prudential  reasons  for  his  not  following  this  one.  He  saw  the 
force  of  them  and  yielded.  The  day  was  spent  pleasantly  in 
paying  and  receiving  friendly  and  official  visits,  according  to 
the  custom  of  Paris ;  but  when  evening  came,  and  his  little 
girl  was  showing  him  the  profusion  of  toys  and  bo7i-bo7is  that 
had  poured  in  on  her  since  morning,  he  turned  away  with  a 
sigh  and  sat  silent  and  absent.  Madame  Ozanam  enquired 
anxiously  if  anything  had  occurred  to  distress  him.  He  con- 
fessed that  the  thought  of  those  poor  people  without  their 
chest  of  drawers  was  weighing  on  him,  and  the  sight  of  all 
this  money  wasted  on  Marie's  pleasure  smote  him  like  a  re- 
proach. Am61ie  entreated  him  to  go  and  satisfy  the  prompt- 
ing of  his  heart.  He  hurried  out,  and  in  a  short  time  re- 
turned radiantly  happy. 

It  was  noticed  by  some  of  his  friends  that,  after  the  general 
Communion  at  Notre  Dame  on  Holy  Thursday,  Ozanam,  in- 
stead of  going  straight  home  to  his  breakfast,  disappeared  in 
another  direction.  They  watched  him,  and  found  that  he 
went  first  to  the  baker's  and  then  to  a  certain  number  of  poor 
famiHes,  where  he  distributed  loaves.  He  frequently  ended  his 
thanksgiving  by  an  act  of  charity  of  this  sort. 

Seldom  is  his  eloquence  more  tenderly  inspired  than  when 
pleading  the  cause  of  the  poor.  He  has  left  some  pages  on 
Almsgiving,  its  duties  and  joys  and  dangers,  whicli  are  amongst 
his  finest.  Speaking  of  the  help  which  honors  and  that  which 
humbles  those  who  recaiA^e  it,  he  says : 

"  Help  is  humiliating  when  iFappeals  to  men  from  below,  taking  heed  of  theif 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  177 

Haterial  wants  only,  paying^  no  attention  but  to  those  of  the  flesh,  to  the  cry 
of  hunger  and  cold,  to  what  excites  pity,  to  what  one  succors  even  in  the 
beasts.  It  humiliates  when  there  is  no  reciprocity,  when  you  give  the  poor 
man  nothing  but  bread,  or  clothes,  or  a  bundle  of  straw — what,  in  fact,  there 
is  no  likelihood  of  his  ever  giving  you  in  return.  .  .  .  But  it  honors  when  it 
appeals  to  him  from  above,  when  it  occupies  itself  with  his  soul,  his  religious, 
moral,  and  political  education,  with  all  that  emancipates  him  from  his  pas- 
sions and  from  a  portion  of  his  wants,  with  those  things  that  make  him  free, 
and  may  make  him  great.  Help  honors  when  to  the  bread  that  nourishes  it 
adds  the  visit  that  consoles,  the  advice  that  enlightens,  the  friendly  shake  of 
the  hand  that  lifts  up  the  sinking  courage  ;  when  it  treats  the  poor  man  with 
respect,  not  only  as  an  equal  but  as  a  superior,  since  he  is  suffering  what 
perhaps  we  are  incapable  of  suffering ;  since  he  is  the  messenger  of 
God  to  us,  sent  to  prove  our  justice  and  our  charity,  and  to  save  us  by  our 
works. 

"  Help  then  becomes  honorable,  because  it  may  become  mutual,  because 
every  man  who  gives  a  kind  word,  a  good  advice,  a  consolation  to-day,  may 
to-morrow  stand  himself  in  need  of  a  kind  word,  an  advice,  or  a  consolation  ; 
because  the  hand  that  you  clasp  clasps  yours  in  return  ;  because  that  indigent 
family  whom  you  love  loves  you  in  return,  and  will  have  largely  acquitted 
themselves  towards  you  when  the  old  man,  the  mother,  the  little  children  shall 
have  prayed  for  you."*  "  Do  you  suppose  you  pay  the  priest  to  whom  the 
State  gives  a  hundred  crowns  t  a  year  to  be  the  father,  the  schoolmaster,  the 
comforter  of  the  poor  village  lost  in  the  mountains  ?  or  the  soldier  who  gets 
five  sous  a  day  to  die  under  the  flag  ?  Why,  the  soldier  gives  the  alms  of  his 
blood  to  the  country,  and  the  priest  that  of  his  words,  his  thoughts,  his  heart, 
that  will  never  know  the  fireside  joys  !  And  the  country  does  neither  the  in- 
justice to  think  that  it  pays  them  ;  it  gives  them  an  alms  that  will  enable  them 
to  resume  to-morrow  the  lowly  self-devotion  of  to-day,  to  return  to  the  bed- 
side of  the  plague-stricken  or  under  the  fire  of  the  Bedouins.  .  ,  .  Don't  tell 
me,  then,  that  I  humiliate  the  poor  man  when  I  treat  him  as  I  treat  the  priest 
who  blesses  and  the  soldier  who  dies  for  me.  Alms  are  the  retribution  of  ser- 
vices that  have  no  salary.  ...  In  our  eyes  the  man  who  suffers  serves  God, 
and  consequently  serves  society  like  him  who  prays;  he  performs  a  ministry 
of  expiation,  a  sacrifice  whose  merits  rebound  on  us  ;  and  we  trust  less  for  our 
safety  to  the  lightning-conductor  above  our  house-tops  than  to  the  prayer  of 
the  poor  woman  and  her  little  children  who  are  sleeping  on  a  truss  of  straw  in 
the  garret  under  our  roof.  And  let  no  one  say  that  in  treating  p>overty  as  a 
priesthood  we  aim  at  perpetuating  it ;  the  same  authority  which  tells  us  that 
we  shall  always  have  the  poor  amongst  us  is  the  same  that  commands  to  do  all 
we  can  that  there  may  cease  to  be  any.  .  .  .  When  you  dread  so  much  to  lay 
an  obligation  on  him  who  accepts  your  alms,  I  fear  it  is  because  you  have  never 
exp>erienced  the  obligation  it  confers  on  him  who  gives.  Those  who  know  the 
road  to  the  poor  man's  house,  whose  feet  have  swept  the  dust  from  his  stairs, 
never  knock  at  his  door  without  a  sentiment  of  respect.     They  know  that  in 

•  Melanges,  i.  p.  29a  f  300  francs 


lyS  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

accepting  bread  from  their  hand,  as  he  takes  the  hght  from  God,  the  poor  man 
honors  them  ;  they  know  that  the  theatre  and  every  other  place  of  amusement 
can  be  paid  for,  but  that  nothing  in  this  world  can  pay  for  two  tears  of  joy  in 
the  eyes  of  a  poor  mother,  nor  the  grasp  of  an  honest  man's  hand  when  one 
has  enabled  him  to  wait  till  he  gets  work.  We  are  all  of  us  subject,  unfortu- 
nately, to  movements  of  brusqiieiie  and  haughtiness  towards  our  inferiors  ; 
but  there  are  few  men  so  wanting  in  delicacy  as  to  speak  harshly  to  the  poor 
man  whom  they  have  relieved,  to  forget  that  an  alms  commits  the  donor,  and 
closes  his  lips  for  ever  to  anything  that  might  seem  like  a  reproach  to  the  re- 
cipient."""* 

Ozanam  was  far,  however,  from  advocating  that  indiscrimi- 
nate ahnsgiving  which  unwisely  benevolent  persons  are  apt 
to  indulge  in.  "  A  severe  inquisition  should  search  out  hid- 
den distress,  interrogate  sorrows  that  do  not  cry  out,  visit  the 
attic  where  the  sick  man  suffers  in  silence,  and  penetrate  even 
into  the  prison  where  the  unfortunate  find  no  echo  to  bear  the 
voice  of  their  anguish  to  the  outer  world."  f  This  prudent 
theory  did  not  prevent  his  being  sometimes  deceived  in  prac- 
tice. There  was  an  Italian  whom  he  had  assisted  for  a  long 
time,  and  finally  procured  a  situation  for  in  a  house  of  busi- 
ness ;  the  man  betrayed  the  confidence  of  his  employers,  and, 
having  again  fallen  into  great  distress,  he  came  back  for  help 
to  his  former  protector,  who,  justly  incensed  at  his  behavior, 
ordered  him  away,  and  bade  him  never  come  near  him  again. 
No  sooner,  however,  had  the  man  left  the  house  than  Oza- 
nam was  smitten  with  remorse  ;  he  said  to  himself  that  it  was 
"  wrong  to  reduce  any  one  to  despair ;  that  one  had  no  right 
to  refuse  a  mouthful  of  bread  to  the  vilest  scoundrel ;  that  he 
himself  would  one  day  want  God  not  to  be  inexorable  towards 
him,  as  he  had  just  been  towards  a  fellew-creature  redeemed 
by  the  blood  of  Jesus  Christ." 

Unable  to  bear  the  thought,  he  seized  his  hat  and  rushed 
out  in  pursuit  of  the  Italian,  whom  he  overtook  in  the  gardens 
of  the  Luxembourg. 

We  have  seen  how  constantly  he  entreated  those  who  gave 
to  enhance  the  value  of  their  benefits  by  bestowing  them  with 

•  De  VAumdne,  vid.  Milanges,  i.  p.  398, 

t  CivilmtiQK  an  5'W  »ecle,  j.  75, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  179 

their  own  hand,  instead  of  through  agents  and  valets.  "  How 
can  the  recipients  of  this  sort  of  bounty  feel  grateful  for  it,  as 
they  would  be  if  it  were  differently  bestowed  ? "  he  would 
urge.  *'  Who  ever  saw  any  person  moved  to  tears  by  the 
regularity  with  which  the  street  fountains  flow  every  morning, 
or  the  gas  is  lighted  for  them  every  evening  ?  " 

He  had  great  order  in  his  almsgiving.  The  budget  of  his 
charities  was  regulated  beforehand  every  year. as  strictly  as 
any  of  his  personal  expenses,  and  rose  in  proportion  to  the  in- 
crease of  his  means ;  he  advised  all  his  friends  to  adopt  his 
plan,  and  thus  save  themselves  the  annoyance  of  never  know- 
ing exactly  how  they  stood  with  regard  to  the  fulfilment  of 
the  duty,  and  from  saying  sometimes  "  I  cannot  afford  it," 
without  being  sure  whether  they  really  can  or  not.  It  would 
be  impossible  to  convey  in  words  an  adequate  idea  of  the 
sweetness,  the  inimitable  grace  with-  which  he  accompanied 
his  own  necessarily  limited  donations.  P^re  Lacordaire's  de- 
scription may  be  applied  to  him  with  truth  :  "  There  is  a  way 
of  giving,  a  charm  that  disguises  the  benefit,  a  transparency 
that  lets  you  look  into  the  heart  and  love  it,  a  something  gen- 
tle, simple,  a  kindly  anticipation  that  draws  the  whole  being, 
and  makes  man  prefer  the  spectacle  of  kindness  to  that  even 
of  genius." 


CHAPTER  XVII. 
1844-5. 

OzANAM,  on  coming  to  Paris,  had  settled  in  a  small  apart- 
ment in  the  Rue  de  Fleurus  overlooking  the  gardens  of  the 
old  Medicean  Palace,  within  a  few  minutes'  walk  of  the  Sor- 
bonne.  The  house  was  very  simple,  but  full  of  household 
gods  that  beautified  it ;  there  were  venerable  old  mahogany- 
gods,  that  spoke  to  him  of  his  kindred  in  remote  times,  and 
blessed  while  they  served  him ;  there  were  cherished  little  gods 
that  reminded  him  of  his  childhood ;  there  were  bright  gods 
of  hope  and  expectation,  tender  Madonnas,  and  laurel-crowned 
poets,  that  smiled  with  a  promise  while  they  beckoned  on- 
ward and  upward.  His  young  wife  was  there  the  queen  of 
the  litde  Parnassus,  a  living  centre  to  the  dumb  divinities 
around. 

They  had  brought  Gui-gui  with  them.  The  old  Lyon- 
nese  servant  was  a  pillar  of  strength  in  the  little  household. 
She  had  now  been  nearly  seventy  years  in  the  service  of  the 
Ozanam  family,  having  entered  as  a  tiny  maiden  in  attendance 
on  the  cocks  and  hens,  until  she  gradually  worked  her  way 
up  to  the  high  functions  of  cook,  a  sceptre  which  she  now 
held  and  exercised  with  jealous  sway.  Her  fabulous  economy 
was  only  equalled  by  her  devotion  to  her  master.  Every 
member  of  the  family  consulted  her  on  all  important  occa- 
sions, and  she  gave  her  opinion  with  rare  good  sense;  need- 
less to  say  that,  as  time  went  by,  she  gave  it  sometimes  with- 
out waiting  to  be  asked.  Gui-gui  was  a  stanch  conservative, 
and  held  on  like  grim  death  to  the  customs  of  her  youth ;  she 
wore  the  picturesque  peasant  dress  of  her  native  village,  un- 
modified by  Parisian  fashions,  and  mounted  guard  over  the 

180 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  i8i 

family  traditions  witli  tlie  stern  remonstrance,  "  Your  grand- 
mother did  this  ;  your  grandfather  did  so-and-so."  Her  spare 
moments  were  spent  saying  never-ending  rosaries  for  the  souls 
of  the  departed  masters,  whose  children  she  looked  upon  as 
her  own,  and  whose  babies  she  sang  to  sleep  with  the  same 
songs  that  had  lulled  four  generations  of  the  race. 

Ozanam  was  thoroughly  happy,  in  full  swing  of  literary 
work,  at  rest  for  the  present,  and  fairly  secure  for  the  future, 
when  an  event  occurred  which  suddenly  changed  the  whole 
aspect  of  his  life  ;  this  was  M.  Fauriel's  death.  He  had  been 
an  invalid  for  years,  yet  the  end  was  as  great  a  surprise  as  if 
it  had  overtaken  him  in  rude  health. 

TO   M.    FOISSET. 

">/y29,  1844. 

"...  Yes,  the  death  of  M.  Fauriel  came  on  me  like  a  thunderbolt.  I 
had  in  him  a  kind  patron  and  an  enlightened  counsellor,  whose  interest  in- 
sured me,  as  his  substitute,  the  perp>etual  possession  of  a  chair  which  hisinfim] 
health  no  longer  permitted  him  to  occupy.  His  friendship  was  my  security, 
.  .  .  Now,  what  are  they  going  to  do  with  me  ?  God  alone  knows.  After 
four  years  of  a  professorship  whose  success  has  surpassed  all  my  hopes,  to 
which  I  sacrificed  everything,  even  in  some  degree  my  health,  having  been 
besides  on  the  best  of  terms  with  everybody,  and  now  that  I  hold  no  title  from 
the  University,  outside  the  Faculty,  it  is  hard  to  suppose  that  they  would 
coolly  dismiss  me,  and  place  another  Professor  in  the  chair  I  have  been  filling. 
The  Faculty  is  of  this  opinion,  and  the  majority  of  the  members  are  disposed 
to  present  me  first  on  the  list  to  the  Minister,  which  would  at  once  settle  my 
nomination  ;  only  they  think  it  fit,  out  of  respect  to  the  memory  of  M.  Fauriel, 
to  wait  for  the  re-opening  of  the  schools.  A  small  minority,  however,  OfH 
poses  these  kind  intentions,  insists  on  my  age — thirty-one — my  want  of  scien- 
tific titles,  and  my  recent  entrance  into  the  University,  and  suggests  that  they 
should  leave  me  time  to  win  my  spurs  by  prolonging  the  vacancy,  and  just 
allow  me  to  hold  the  professorship  next  year  as  chargide  cours  ;  that  is  to 
say,  on  a  precarious  title. 

"  I  am  quite  alive  to  the  perils  of  a  provisional  position  in  a  time  of  strife 
like  the  present,  when  the  kindly  dispositions  of  public  feeling  may  change  so 
quickly.  All  my  efforts,  therefore,  are  brought  to  bear  on  this  point.  Several 
friends  are  seconding  me  by  active  steps  ;  but  all  may  help  me  by  theii 
prayers.  All  I  ask  of  God  is  that  He  will  take  the  delicate  matter  into  His 
own  hands,  so  that  I  may  neither  betray  the  duties  of  my  state  by  imprudence, 
nor  my  honor  as  a  Christian  by  pusillanimity. 

"  After  all,  it  may  be  best  for  my  salvation  that  I  should  not  succeed  ;  and 
in  that  case  all  I  desire  is  firmness,  resignation,  and  peace  of  heart  ;  to  be  re- 


1 82  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

signed  to  everything,  even  to  the  precarious,  even  to  uncertainty,  which  is  per- 
haps the  most  painful  of  all,  but  which  we  should  accustom  ourselves  to,  since 
God  has  placed  it  everywhere,  in  life,  in  death,  in  health,  in  fortune,  and  that 
He  saw  fit  to  let  us  live — we  who  so  desire  to  be  certain  of  our  revenues,  our 
projects,  our  successes — in  the  most  terrible  of  all  doubts,  *  whether  we  are 
worthy  of  love  in  His  eyes.' 

"  These  sentiments,  that  I  am  trying- hard  to  penetrate  myself  with  for  these 
last  fifteen  days,  are  fortunately  firmly  enthroned  in  the  heart  of  my  wife,  who, 
for  my  greater  trial,  is  absent  from  me  at  this  painful  crisis.  I  had  to  remain 
here  in  the  breach,  and  I  shall  of  course  have  to  remain  on  through  all  the 
holidays." 

The  trial  was  prolonged  beyond  the  holidays.  Ozanam 
continued  in  the  same  uncertainty  as  to  his  fate  until  the 
close  of  November,  when  he  was  nominated  Professor  at  the 
Sorbonne  for  life,  in  the  vacant  place  of  M.  Fauriel,  and  with 
the  increased  salary  belonging  to  the  position.  M.  Ampere 
is  the  first  to  whom  he  sends  the  good  tidings  : 

TO    AMPERE. 

"  "zyi  November^  1844. 

**  I  come  to  announce  the  great  news  to  you.  At  last,  on  Saturday  at  two 
o'clock,  the  Minister  of  Public  Instruction  signed  my  nomination.  The  pre- 
sentation of  the  Academical  Council  had  already  been  unanimous,  like  that  of 
the  Faculty.  The  Royal  Council  had  givep  its  opinion  similarly  on  Friday. 
It  seemed  therefore  as  if  nothing  remained  to  be  done  but  to  sign  ;  and  yet,  to 
justify  what  you  said  so  truly  about  the  terrors  of  the  last  moment,  we  were 
informed  that  the  Minister  would  not  terminate  the  matter,  but  ordered  the 
paper  for  the  classes  to  be  posted  up  with  a  blank  after  my  name,  so  as  to  give 
him  further  time  for  reflection.  M.  le  Clerc  was  obliged  to  exercise  no  ordi- 
nary zeal  and  firmness  in  order  literally  to  compel  the  signature.  But  at  last 
the  thing  was  done,  and  was  this  morning  executed  by  my  taking  the  oath 
before  the  Dean  ;  it  is  published  to-day  in  all  the  newspapers,  and  borne  by 
these  organs  of  publicity  to  my  friends  in  the  four  corners  of  France.  We 
were  looking  forward  to  this  conclusion  certainly  as  a  great  happiness,  and  yet 
I  must  confess  that  our  joy  has  been  far  greater  than  we  anticipated.  It  is 
almost  humiliating  to  be  so  much  moved  by  a  temporal  advantage  ;  but  at  the 
first  moment  this  end  of  all  our  fears  and  anxieties,  the  new-found  security, 
the  sense  of  peace,  overcame  Amelie  and  myself  more  than  I  dare  to  say. 

'*  I  was  so  happy  to  see  this  dear  life,  superadded  to  my  own,  henceforth 
sheltered,  as  far  as  it  humanly  can  be,  from  those  cares  and  vicissitudes  which 
wear  out  the  noblest  hearts  ;  to  see  an  honorable  position,  and  one  worthy  of 
her,  secured  to  her,  and  at  the  same  time  to  feel  myself  in  conditions  of  inde- 
pendence which  will  permit  me  to  do  my  duty  without  incurring  mortifying 
suspicions  and  threatening  interpretations  1    Then  the  congratulations  of  ouf 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  183 

friends  followed  quickly  on  these  first  emotions,  and  added  to  their  sweetness, 
till  we  can  scarcely  tell  what  has  given  us  most  pleasure,  our  own  success  oi 
the  pleasure  it  has  given  so  many  kind,  excellent,  and  devoted  persons. 

"  I  knew  well  already,  God  having  taught  it  me  by  experience,  that  we  need 
our  friends  in  sorrow,  but  I  had  yet  to  learn  how  much  we  want  them  in  hap- 
piness. Oh  I  we  see  it  now  well  enough  by  the  void  which  your  absence 
causes  us,  and  this  is  why  I  felt  I  must  tell  you,  as  to  a  brother  at  full  length 
— the  way  you  like  it — all  that  we  felt  on  this  great  occasion.  You  must  en- 
joy your  work  a  little,  you  who,  after  God,  are  the  author  of  all  this  pros- 
perity ;  you  who  welcomed  me  as  a  brother  into  the  house  of  your  good  and 
glorious  father,  who  started  me  on  the  road,  who  led  me  from  trial  to  trial, 
step  by  step,  to  this  chair,  where  I  am  now  seated,  only  because  the  one  man 
who  is  really  worthy  to  fill  it  refuses  it. 

"  How  beautiful  are  the  designs  of  Providence  when  we  see  them  as  a  whole 
and  in  the  distance !  .  .  . 

"  We  see  in  this  event,"  he  writes  to  M.  Foisset,  "  a  merciful  dispensation 
of  Providence  to  point  out  to  me  how  I  am  to  serve  God  in  this  world,  to 
render  my  duties  easy  to  me,  because  I  am  weak,  and  to  prepare  me,  by  a 
moment  of  prosperity,  for  the  trials  of  the  future.  How  indeed  can  we  do 
otherwise  than  recognize  the  Divine  inter^•ention  in  an  event  of  which  we  now 
know  all  the  vicissitudes,  the  obstacles  that  have  crossed  it,  and  the  unlikely 
coincidences  that  we  had  to  overcome  ?  We  are  really  less  astonished  at  the 
result  than  at  the  manner  in  which  it  has  been  brought  about,  the  unanimous 
support  which  I  obtained  successively  in  the  Royal  Council,  in  the  Faculty,  in 
the  Academical  Council,  and  this  without  their  exacting  from  me  a  single 
step  in  advance,  the  least  concession  or  reserve  ;  without  hinting,  as  they 
might  have  done,  that  I  should  exercise  more  prudetice  in  my  lectures  ;  with- 
out so  much  as  asking  me  to  write,  as  it  is  customary  to  do,  a  letter  presenting 
myself  as  a  candidate,  lest  they  should  seem  to  be  imposing  any  conditions  on 
me.  It  is  in  fact  impossible  to  push  kindness  and  delicacy  further  than  the 
Dean  of  the  Faculty  has  done.  But  what  crowns  my  satisfaction  is  the  way 
ournuraerous  friends  have  shared  it ;  one  would  think  it  was  a  personal  suc- 
cess for  them  all ;  and  so  it  is,  for  we  have  no  manner  of  doubt  that  their 
prayers  helped  on  our  success,  just  as  we  count  on  them  now  to  enable  us  to 
prove  grateful  and  worthy  of  it." 

Ozanam's  youth  had  been  a  serious  obstacle  in  his  way. 
M.  Guizot,  the  youngest  Professor  the  University  had  yet 
admitted,  was  seven-and-thirty  when  he  was  nominated,  and 
Ozanam  was  five  years  younger.  This  precedent  made  his 
success  the  more  striking.  The  pupils  of  the  College  Stanis- 
las were  the  only  portion  of  his  friends  who  did  not  rejoice  at 
it;  they  were  proud  of  his  triumph,  but  it  was  to  cost  them 
dear.     No  Professor  of  the  University  was  allowed  to  give 


184  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

lessons  in  any  minor  college,  consequently  their  master's  new 
honors  involved  their  losing  him.  Young  as  the  boys  were, 
they  had  realized  the  privilege  of  his  teaching,  and  occasion- 
ally expressed  this  fact  to  him  in  verses,  thanking  their  "  guide 
savant  et  aimable  "  for  leaving  the  learned  crowd  outside  in 
favor  of  the  humble  audience  of  a  schoolroom.  One  of  these 
affectionate  effusions  assures  him — 

"  Votre  coeur  respirant  du  fardeau  de  la  gloire, 
Y  trouvera  du  moins  des  coeurs  reconnaissants." 

In  their  despair  at  losing  him  they  wrote  to  the  Minister, 
M.  Villeraain,  imploring  him  to  suspend  the  prohibition  in 
their  favor,  and  allow  their  dear  master  to  remain  with  them. 
They  tried  to  enlist  Ozanam  himself  on  their  side,  and  wrote 
him  a  letter  which  is  too  characteristic  to  be  omitted  ; 

"  Monsieur  :  We  cannot  find  words  to  express  to  you  the  painful  surprise 
with  which  we  received  yesterday  the  news  of  the  misfortune  which  threatens 
us.  Those  who  have  only  known  you  a  few  months,  and  those  who,  after  as- 
sisting a  whole  year  at  your  lectures,  earnestly  hoped  to  enjoy  them  much 
longer,  are  all  equally  afflicted,  and  I  have  received  the  sad  mission  of  express- 
ing to  you  this  universal  sorrow.  Still  all  hope  is  not  perhaps  over,  and  how 
ever  unworthy  we  may  be  of  occupying  so  precious  a  time  as  yours,  we  dare 
entreat  you  to  take  our  cause  into  your  own  hands ^  and  to  preserve  to  us,  ly pos- 
sible, the  master  whom  we  have  most  loved. " 

Their  efforts  proved  unavailing.  M.  Villemain  did  not  re- 
lent, but  Ozanam  was  touched  to  the  heart  by  this  letter, 
which  he  carefully  preserved.  Yet  with  all  his  kindness  they 
had  not  found  him  an  easy-going  master.  On  the  contrary, 
he  was,  as  a  Professor,  exceptionally  severe.  As  an  examiner 
he  gave  no  quarter.  He  so  mistrusted  his  natural  tendency 
to  indulgence  that  conscientiousness  drove  him  into  the  op- 
posite extreme,  and  once  in  his  official  capacity  of  judge  he 
was  impartial  almost  to  hardness,  more  especially  towards 
candidates  in  whom  he  took  a  personal  interest.  There  is  a 
story  told  of  a  young  proteg^  whom  he  had  taken  infinite 
pains  to  prepare  for  his  examinations,  and  who,  when  the  day 
of  ordeal  came,  was  within  an  ace  of  being  dismissed,  owing 
to  the  merciless  rigor  of  Ozanam's  interrogations.     From  this 


Life  and  IVjrks  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  185 

time  forth  the  candidates  rather  feared  than  sought  a  friendly 
recommendation  to  him,  saying  that  it  only  doubled  the  chance 
of  lailuie.  But  his  greatest  severity  was  displayed  towards 
ecclesiastical  students.  One  day  a  young  seminarist  called 
on  him  to  enquire  into  the  reasons  of  his  failure  at  the  recent 
examinations.  Ozanam  received  him  with  the  utmost  kind- 
ness, and  pointed  out  to  him  in  detail  the  various  flaws  of  his 
version;  then  suddenly  changing  his  tone,  and  assuming  a 
severe  countenance,  he  said :  "  Your  very  dress,  Monsieur, 
compels  us  to  be  more  exacting.  When  one  has  the  honor  to 
wear  the  livery  of  the  priesthood,  one  should  not  lightly  expose 
it  to  a  similar  disgrace." 

M.  Soulacroix  was  named  Chef  de  Division  in  the  Ministry 
of  Public  Instruction  in  the  spring  of  the  following  year 
(1845),  ^  circumstance  which,  by  drawing  his  wife's  family 
closer  to  him,  was  a  source  of  sincere  rejoicing  to  Ozanam. 
He  continued  to  work  arduously  at  his  pen,  but  complains 
much  of  the  inadequate  results.  '*  I  am  dying  with  impa- 
tience to  resume  my  researches  on  Germany,  which  were  be- 
ginning to  interest  me  intensely  just  as  I  had  to  interrupt 
them,"  he  says  to  M.  Foisset.  "  But  really  I  despair  of  ever 
doing  anything  considerable,  because  of  my  slowness  and  my 
facility  for  losing  time.  Ah  !  if  I  only  had  the  activity  that  I 
see  in  you,  in  my  father-in-law,  and  that  I  used  to  see  in  my 
father,  but  which  is  becoming  rare,  and  seems  as  if  it  would 
disappear  altogether.  It  strikes  me  that  the  great  secret  of 
education  nowadays  should  be  to  destroy  this  tendency  of 
the  mind  to  wandering.  Of  all  the  qualities  ofihe  grand  Steele, 
that  which  upheld  all  the  others  was  perhaps  the  one  that 
Bossuet  prized  so  highly,  and  the  want  of  which  he  so  bitterly 
deplored  in  his  pupil — application." 

This  year  of  prosperity,  as  he  calls  it,  held  yet  another 
blessing  in  store  for  Ozanam,  a  joy  that  put  the  crown  on  all 
those  that  went  before. 


1 86  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

''to  m.  foisset. 

"  August  'jth,  1845. 

"  My  friends  have  a  great  deal  to  do  this  year  helping  me  to  give  thanks. 
After  so  many  favors  which  fixed  my  vocation  in  this  world  and  put  an  end  to 
the  scattering  of  my  family,  a  new  blessing  has  come  to  me,  the  greatest  joy, 
probably,  it  is  possible  to  experience  here  below  :  /  am  a  father  / 

"  We  prayed  much  ;  we  begged  for  prayers  on  every  side  ;  never  did  we  feel 
greater  need  of  the  Divine  assistance  !  We  have  been  heard  above  and  be- 
yond all  our  hopes.  Ah  !  what  a  moment  that  was  when  I  heard  the  first  cry 
of  my  child  ;  when  I  beheld  that  little  creati\re,  but  that  immortal  creature, 
which  God  has  confided  to  me,  who  brought  me  so  many  dehghts  and  so  many 
duties  !  With  what  impatience  I  waited  for  the  moment  of  her  baptism  !  We 
have  called  her  Marie,  which  is  her  mother's  name,  as  well  as  that  of  the  pow- 
erful protectress  to  whose  intercession  we  attribute  this  happy  birth.  The  mo- 
ther is  now  nearly  well  again,  and  is  able  to  nurse  her  child.  Thus  we  shall 
not  lose  the  first  smiles  of  our  little  angel.  We  will  begin  her  education  early, 
and,  at  the  same  time,  she  will  begin  ours  ;  for  I  perceive  that  Heaven  has  sent 
her  to  us  to  teach  us  a  great  deal,  and  to  make  us  better.  I  cannot  look  upon 
that  sweet  little  face,  so  full  of  innocence  and  purity,  without  seeing  there,  less 
obliterated  than  in  us,  the  sacred  impress  of  the  Creator.  I  cannot  think  of  this 
imperishable  soul,  of  which  I  shall  have  to  render  an  account,  without  feeling 
myself  more  penetrated  with  my  duties.  How  could  I  dare  teach  her  lessons 
that  I  did  not  practise  >  Could  God  have  found  a  kinder  way  of  instructing  me, 
of  correcting  me,  and  setting  my  feet  on  the  road  to  heaven  ?  Oh  !  you,  dear 
friend,  who  exercise  so  worthily  these  grand  functions  of  fatherhood,  remember 
me  before  God,  and  ask  for  your  young  friend  the  light,  the  inspiration,  the 
strength  that  he  needs  from  above.  Remember  my  child,  too,  who  will  pay  it 
back  to  you  some  day,  I  hope.  Her  mother,  who  is  sincerely  attached  to  you, 
bids  me  say  how  grateful  she  would  be  for  an  Ave  Maria  when  you  are  gathered 
together  for  family  prayers.  Your  paternal  confidences  of  last  year  come  back 
to  us,  and  we  sigh  in  thinking  that  some  day  we  shall  perhaps  have  to  marry 
our  little  Marie  !  .  .  .  Adieu.  I  must  terminate  sooner  than  I  wish  a  letter 
that  was  begun,  interrupted,  and  taken  up  again  ten  times  in  the  midst  of  the 
Baccalaureat,  which  keeps  me  at  the  Sorbonne  all  day.  I  scribble  off  ten  lines 
while  M.  Guigniaut  and  M.  Garnier  are  examining,  in  philosophy,  Greek,  and 
Latin,  unfortunate  candidates  who  know  very  little  about  them ;  and  I  lay 
down  my  pen  to  put  questions  in  history,  geography,  and  literature,  travelling 
over  all  space  and  time  and  then  coming  back  to  you." 

His  little  treasure  was  a  daily-increasing  source  of  tender 
and  poetic  delight  to  him, 

"  There  is  nothing  more  delicious  on  this  earth,"  he  says,  "  than  on  coming 
home  to  find  my  beloved  wife  with  her  little  baby  in  her  arms.  I  then  make 
a  third  figure  in  the  group,  and  I  would  willingly  lose  myself  for  whole  hours 
in  admiring  it,  if  presently  a  little  cry  did  not  come  to  warn  me  that  poor 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  187 

human  nature  is  very  fragile,  that  many  perils  are  suspended  over  that  tiny 
head,  and  that  the  joys  of  fatherhood  are  only  given  us  to  sweeten  its  duties." 

The  examinations  at  the  Sorbonne  had  kept  him  so  occu- 
pied  all  through  the  summer  that  he  was  not  able  to  escape 
from  Paris  until  September,  when  he  went  with  his  wife  and 
child  to  Nogent,  a  little  village  outside  Paris. 

"  All  this  summer,"  he  writes  to  Lallier,  at  the  end  of  August,  "  I  have  seen 
no  other  verdure  than  the  green  table  where  we  hold  the  examinations 
of  the  bachelors.  These  last  three  days  I  have  been  seated  at  it  from  ten  in 
the  morning  till  seven  in  the  evening ;  and  I  can  only  manage  to  write  you  a 
line  in  the  short  interval  between  the  question  of  geography  and  the  question 
of  history.  This  is  why  I  don't  touch  on  the  g^reat  events  of  the  day.  .  .  . 
The  number  of  our  conferences  has  been  increased  by  five  new  ones  this  last 
month.  We  have  six  now  in  London.  Do  you  remember  how  cross  we  were 
with  you  in  1833,  when  you  brought  us  poor  De  la  Noue,  who  increased  our 
number  to  nine  ?  Now  we  are  nearly  nine  thousand  !  So  you  see  these  poor 
Catholics  are  not  dead  yet.  Now,  as  in  the  days  of  St.  Paul,  quasi  morientes 
et  tamen  viventes.''* 

The  holidays  brought  rest  only  in  the  shape  of  a  change  ot 
work  to  Ozanam.  This  year  they  were  employed  in  finishing 
what  he  calls  his  "  interminable  volume  "  on  the  History  of 
Christian  Civilization  amongst  the  Germans. 

♦'  The  quiet  of  the  country  affords  me  a  leisure  which  I  have  not  known  for 
a  long  time,"  he  writes ;  "we  are  about  three-quarters  of  an  hour  beyond 
Vincennes,  on  a  rising  ground  which  overlooks  the  Mame.  The  garden  is 
large,  the  air  is  pure,  the  weather  lovely.  My  wife  is  picking  up  her  strength 
rapidly,  and  my  child  is  opening  out  like  a  little  flower.  It  is  one  of  those 
moments  of  bliss  which  are  not  often  granted  to  us  in  life,  and  Which  make  us 
feel  more  keenly  the  goodness  of  Providence." 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 

1846. 

The  year  1846  was  unmarked  by  any  event  of  importance 
in  Ozanam's  public  or  private  career.  He  continued  to  work 
as  if  he  had  a  second  life  in  reserve  to  supplement  the  frail 
one  he  drew  upon  so  pitilessly.  His  health  was  giving  way,  but 
he  did  not  or  would  not  see  it.  His  literary  work  was  daily 
increasing,  and  absorbed  all  the  time  he  could  spare  from  his 
professional  occupations.  This  did  not  prevent  his  devoting 
himself,  as  in  the  past,  to  the  service  of  the  poor.  After  the 
exhaustion  of  his  morning's  lecture  at  the  Sorbonne,  he  was 
constantly  to  be  heard  in  the  evening  lecturing  to  an  assembly 
of  working-men  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Sulpice,  and  he  would  put 
forth  his  powers  as  earnestly  here  as  when  addressing  the 
most  fastidious  and  cultivated  audience.  Those  who  have 
heard  him  speaking  to  the  uneducated  classes  declare  that  it 
was  wonderful  how  he  contrived  to  bring  the  riches  of  his 
learnuig,  and  his  lofty  mind,  within  their  reach,  and  how  in- 
tensely they  responded  to  the  effort.  "  My  friends,"  he  said 
to  them  on  one  occasion,  "  we  have  each  of  us  our  trade  in 
this  life.  My  trade  is  to  wade  through  old  books ;  well,  I  can 
assure  you  tliat  under  the  dust  of  these  old  folios  I  come  upon 
lessons  which  the  past  has  bequeathed  to  us  under  the  most 
fascinating  form.  Let  me  tell  you  one  of  these  old  stories 
that  charmed  away  the  long  evenings  for  our  fathers."  And 
with  a  grace  and  an  eloquence  which  the  Sorbonne  might 
have  envied,  he  went  on  to  relate  to  them  one  of  those  beau- 
tiful legends  that  Ireland  would  seem  to  have  stolen  from  the 
East,  and  transfigured  with  her  Christian  touch.     The  rough 

188 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam.  i  S9 

audience  listened  in  breathless  delight,  understanding  and  ap- 
plauding.    Then  came  the  moral : 

*•  These  legends,"  continued  the  orator,  "  are  symbolical  of  another  world, 
where  all  that  we  have  done  in  this  one  is  punished  or  rewarded.  We  are  all 
of  us  like  the  weavers  of  the  Gobelins,  who,  following  out  the  pattern  of  an  un- 
known artist,  endeavor  to  match  the  threads  of  divers  colors  on  the  wrong 
side  of  the  woof,  and  do  not  see  the  result  of  their  labor.  It  is  only  when  the 
texture  is  complete  that  they  can  admire  at  their  ease  these  lovely  flowers  and 
figures,  those  splendid  pictures  worthy  of  the  palaces  of  kings.  So  it  is  with 
us,  my  friends  ;  we  work,  we  suffer,  and  we  see  neither  the  end  nor  the  fruit. 
But  God  sees  it,  and  when  He  releases  us  from  our  task.  He  will  disclose  to 
our  wondering  gaze  what  He,  the  great  artist,  everywhere  present  and  invis- 
ible, has  woven  out  of  those  toils  that  now  seem  to  us  so  sterile,  and  He  will 
then  deign  to  hang  up  in  his  palace  of  gold  the  flimsy  web  that  we  have 
spun." 

It  is  not  surprising  that  Ozanam  should  have  been  a  popu- 
lar speaker  with  the  working-men.  He  counted  himself  one 
of  them,  and  his  eloquence  had  in  it  a  note  of  real  personal 
pride  when  it  dwelt  upon  the  dignity  and  power  of  labor,  of 
human  toil  in  every  field.  His  works  abound  in  fine  passages 
on  labor  as  one  of  the  regenerating  forces  of  the  world,  and 
of  arguments  and  examples  tending  to  show  how  the  laborer, 
oppressed  and  despised  by  Paganism,  was  rehabilitated  by 
Christianity. 

"  Let  us  see  what  Christianity  has  done  for  the  ouvriers,^^  he  says.  *'  Free 
labor  has  no  greater  enemy  than  slavery,  consequently  the  ancients,  who  held 
to  slavery,  trampled  free  labor  under  foot ;  they  spurned  it  and  stigmatized  it 
with  the  most  offensive  names.  Even  Cicero— that  great  and  wise  man 
whom  we  are  so  fond  of  quoting — Cicero  says  somewhere  that  there  is  no- 
thing liberal  in  manual  labor  ;  that  trade,  if  it  be  small,  is  to  be  considered 
sordid,  but,  if  vast  and  opulent,  need  not  be  too  severely  blamed  .*  .  .  .  Ac- 
cording to  the  law  of  the  Twelve  Tables,  the  debtor  who  could  not  pay  was 
placed  at  the  discretion  of  his  creditor  to  be  sold  as  a  slave,  or  else  cut  up  into 
as  many  pieces  as  there  were  creditors,  so  that  each  one  might  have  his  share. 
In  the  days  of  Senecusthey  no  longer  cut  him  up,  but  they  compelled  him  to 
sell  his  children,  and,  so  far  on  as  Constantine's  reign,  the  children  of  the 
insolvent  debtor  were  sold  on  tha  public  market-place.  This  is  how  free  la- 
bor fared  under  the  ancients.  Christianity  restored  it  to  its  original  rank  by 
the  example  of  Christ  and  the  apostles,  by  that  of  St.  Paul,  who  went  into 

*  D*  OgiciU,  1.  i.  c.  43. 


190  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

partnership  with  the  Jew  Aquila  at  Corinth  rather  than  eat  bread  which  he 
had  not  gained  in  the  sweat  of  his  brow."* 

Ozanam,  not  satisfied  with  proving  the  respectability  of  la- 
bor, called  in  poetry  to  invest  it  with  dignity  and  beauty. 

"  When  we  plunge  into  the  valleys  of  the  Vosges  and  the  Jura,  into  the 
heart  of  those  rugged  countries  where  the  old  German  manners  were  so  long 
retained,  the  first  thing  that  strikes  us  is  the  wild  majesty  of  the  scene.  But, 
on  looking  closer,  we  find  that  a  power  stronger  than  nature  has  been  at  work, 
pursuing  her  to  this  sanctuary,  subduing  and  compelling  her  to  serve,  not 
sparing  even  those  things  which  seemed  created  for  repose  and  liberty.  I  al- 
lude to  the  power  of  labor.  Where  shall  we  find  a  grander  image  of  calm 
than  those  broad  trees  that  seem  born  to  do  nothing,  like  the  sons  of  the  an- 
cient kings  >  They  must,  nevertheless,  come  down  from  their  heights  and  go 
and  serve  the  peasant,  who  will  make  them  uphold  the  roof  of  his  cabin,  or 
the  navigator,  who  will  use  them  as  ribs  for  his  ships.  What  is  freer  than  the 
torrent  ?  And  yet  labor  has  come  and  seized  it  in  its  bed,  and  imprisoned  it^ 
and  bound  it  like  a  slave  to  the  mill.  Say  not  that  these  manufactories  are  a 
blot  upon  the  wild  beauty  of  the  desert :  the  ring  of  the  hammer  and  the  smoke 
of  the  forge  proclaim  to  you  that  creation  obeys  man,  and  man  God.  "  t 

The  universal  law  of  labor  applies  with  him  in  equal  force 
to  the  sons  of  toil  who  till  the  earth  and  draw  water  from  the 
river,  and  to  those  laborers  who  dig  in  the  field  of  science,  art, 
or  literature.  Here  it  is  that  he  expresses  with  perfect  sin- 
cerity the  sense  of  kindred  with  his  lowlier  brother  workmen. 

Speaking  of  the  progress  of  the  French  language  from  its 
ruder  stages  under  Clovis,  Charlemagne,  the  Middle  Ages, 
and  up  to  the  period  when  Pascal  came  to  define  its  limits, 
and  Bourdaloue  and  Bossuet  to  ennoble  and  refine  it,  and 
bring  it  to  that  state  of  perfection  which  it  is  the  duty  of  living 
men  of  letters  to  preserve,  he  goes  on  to  say : 

*'  Hence  the  obligation  of  work.  Work  is  the  common  law  of  mankind  ; 
it  is  the  law  of  the  mind  as  well  as  of  the  body  ;  for  it  was  also  to  the  labors 
of  the  mind  that  those  words  pronounced  on  the  day  of  the  Fall  applied — 
'  Thou  shalt  eat  thy  bread  in  the  sweat  of  thy  brow.'  Look  at  that  long  tradi- 
tion of  labor  in  the  Church,  from  Origen,  the  man  with  the  bowels  of  brass,  as 
St.  Augustine  called  him,  who  began  so  late,  and  nevertheless  saw  everything, 
down  to  St.  Thomas,  who  died  at  nine-and-forty,  leaving  us  seventeen  vol- 
umes in  folio.     In  more  modern  times,  see  Bossuet  rising  at  two  o'clock  in  the 

•  Civilisation  ausmesiicle,  vol.  ii.  p.  66, 
t  EtutUt  Germauiqtus,  ii.  ch«f>.  ix.  p.  649. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  191 

morning  to  resume  the  work  he  had  scarcely  interrupted  ;  see  d'Aguesseau  de- 
claring that  a  change  of  work  was  the  only  recreation  the  mind  needed  ;  see 
those  magistrates  of  the  seventeenth  century  going  forth  at  six  in  the  morn- 
ing to  take  their  seats  on  \.\iq  fleurs-de-lis^  giving  the  whole  day  to  the  public 
functions,  the  evening  to  the  education  of  their  children,  and  dividing  the 
night  between  study  and  prayer.  Seven  or  eight  hours  a  day  given  to  science 
alarms  the  solicitude  of  our  friends  for  our  wretched  health.  Let  us  remem- 
ber, nevertheless,  that  we  are  not  dispensed  by  faith  from  fatigue  and  watch- 
ings.  Labor,  the  chastisement  of  the  Fall,  has  become  the  law  of  regenera- 
tion. It  is  labor  that  produces  glorious  epochs,  when  it  finds  inspiration 
there,  and,  when  it  does  not  find  it,  it  still  produces  useful  men  and  estimable 
nations."* 

The  examinations  for  the  Baccalaureat  came  round,  and 
brought  their  usual  increase  of  work  to  the  Professor,  who 
again  describes  himself  in  the  sultry  August  heat,  **  sitting  for 
eight  or  ten  hours  a  day  at  that  blessed  green  table,"  and  try- 
ing to  write  a  hurried  line  to  a  friend  between  Greek  and 
mathematics,  "  surrounded  by  yawning  colleagues  and  trem- 
bling candidates,"  and  pining  inexpressibly  for  a  breath  of 
fresh  country  air.  "  Nothing  is  comparable  to  the  pleasures 
of  the  woods  and  fields,"  he  says ;  "  the  balmy  air,  the  very 
odors  of  the  farmyard,  are  all  conducive  to  health ;  the  coun- 
try is  full  of  teaching  and  full  of  consolation,  and  we  deprive 
ourselves  of  both  by  rerhaining  penned  up  in  the  walls  of  our 
cities."  But  he  turns,  after  this  little  petulant  outbreak,  to 
deeper  sources  of  consolation : 

"  We  Catholics  have  this  happiness  :  that  our  cause  wills  to  be  served  at  the 
same  time  in  different  ways,  that  adapt  themselves  to  the  diversity  of  charac- 
ters and  minds  ;  it  requires  men  of  war  and  men  of  peace,  the  crusade  of  con- 
troversy and  the  proselytism  of  charity.  I  admire  those  who  fight  gloriously 
in  the  breach,  but  I  cannot  help  preferring  for  my  friends  and  myself  the  other 
ministry,  which,  if  less  brilliant,  is  also  less  dangerous.  .  .  ." 

But  this  life  of  arduous  toil  and  study  could  not  go  on  with 
impunity  for  ever.  The  body  is  long-suffering,  and  bears  a 
great  deal  from  the  noble  tyranny  of  the  soul,  but,  driven 
beyond  certain  limits,  it  rebels  and  vindicates  its  rights. 
Before  the  end  of  the  examinations  Ozanam  fell  ill  of  a  ma- 
lignant fever,  which  placed  his  Hfe  in  great  danger.     At  the 

•  Devoirt  LilUrairet  des  CkritUns — Milan^u,  i.  p.  i6a 


tgi  Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

beginning  of  September  lie  had  begun  to  recover,  and  writes 
to  M.  Leon  Bore  from  Meudon,  on  the  22d: 

"  My  long  silence  would  have  been  an  unpardonable  ingratitude  if  it  had 
been  voluntary ;  but  just  as  I  was  taking  up  my  pen  to  thank  you  for  your 
two  kind  letters,  I  was  seized  with  the  first  symptoms  of  a  fever  of  such  an 
alarming  character  that  I  should  probably  not  have  got  over  it  but  for  the  ex- 
cellent care  of  our  common  friend,  M.  Gourand,  and  the  intelligent  and  cour- 
ageous self-devotion  of  Amelie,  which  was  an  immense  support  to  me  through 
this  crisis.  God  has,  however,  seen  good  to  spare  me  a  little  while  longer,  in 
order  that  I  may  have  time  to  grow  better  ;  and  as  if  to  prolong  the  salutary 
warning  of  the  illness  itself,  my  convalescence,  which  has  lasted  nearly  a 
month,  still  keeps  me  in  a  state  of  weakness  that  renders  the  least  bodily  ex- 
ertion, the  slightest  mental  effort,  impossible.  I  never  before,/^// what  a  poor 
creature  man  is.  I  can't  tell  you  how  humiliated  I  feel  to  be  eating  and  sleep- 
ing well,  and  yet  so  exhausted  that  an  hour's  application  suffices  to  fatigue  my 
head  and  compel  me  to  lie  down.  I  use  the  first  liberty  the  doctors  have 
granted  me  to  repair  a  delay  which  was  weighing  on  my  heart.  ...  I  wai 
for  a  long  time  overwhelmed  with  innumerable  and  imperative  occupations, 
to  the  excess  of  which,  so  they  say,  my  illness  is  to  be  attributed.  Now  I  am 
condemned  to  complete  idleness,  and,  the  better  to  draw  my  mind  away  from 
men  and  books,  they  have  buried  me  in  the  woods  of  Meudon.  My  wife  has 
come  in  to  protest  against  my  writing  too  much.  I  let  her  take  the  pen  out . 
of  my  hand,  just  for  the  sake  of  giving  a  good  example  to  all  the  husbands  of 
the  earth." 

The  ilhiess  had  found  him  so  reduced  in  strength  that  it 
was  astonishing  that  he  should  have  battled  through  it  at  all ; 
and  now,  though  nominally  recovered,  he  continued  in  a  state 
of  such  alarming  prostration  that  it  became  a  question  whether 
he  had  vitality  enough  left  to  rally  to  his  normal  state.  The 
doctors  declared  his  only  chance  was  to  take  a  year's  com- 
plete rest.  Even  if  pecuniary  difficulties  had  not  intervened, 
this  was  a  difficult  prescription  for  Ozanam.  How  was  that 
ardent  mind,  with  its  sleepless  activity,  to  be  kept  idle  for  a 
whole  year  ?  There  was  but  one  way  of  doing  it ;  this  was  to 
spend  the  interval  in  travelling.  M.  de  Salvandy,  the  Minister 
of  Public  Instruction,  hearing  of  the  circumstances,  hastened 
to  facilitate  things  by  sending  the  Professor  on  a  literary  mis- 
sion to  Italy.  It  was  done  with  the  kindest  intention,  and 
not  with  the  view  of  turning  the  period  of  relaxation  into  a 
change  of  fatigue ;  but  Ozanam's  extreme  conscientiousness 
gave  the  mission  too  much  of  that  character. 


CHAPTER  XIX. 

1847. 

Starting  in  November,  1846,  Ozanam  and  his  wife  made 
a  tour  in  the  south  of  France,  and  then  went  by  slow  stages 
through  Genoa  and  Florence  to  Rome,  where  they  were  to 
pass  the  winter.  Under  this  delightful  regime  his  health 
rapidly  revived,  although  he  did  not  spare  it  in  the  service  of 
his  mission.  Every  journey  he  made  produced  a  book,  some- 
times two.  The  result  of  the  present  one  was  his  volumes  en- 
titled Unpublished  Documents  to  serine  for  the  Literary  History 
of  Italy  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Thirteenth  Century^  and  that 
charming  book,  The  Franciscan  Poets.  The  first  he  considered 
his  work,  the  latter  was  his  recreation.  But  the  work  had 
presently  to  be  given  up.  The  fatigue  of  copying  out  Latin 
and  Italian  MSS.  in  the  libraries  and  museums  all  the  morn- 
ing, then  classifying  and  arranging  them  in  the  afternoon, 
began  to  tell  upon  his  health,  still  far  from  restored,  and  he 
was  compelled  to  give  up  altogether  by  the  time  he  reached 
Rome. 

•*  Plead  for  me  with  the  mativaises  langues,  who  are  accusing  me  of  silence 
and  laziness,"  he  writes  to  his  brother  from  Rome  in  February.  "Ask  Charles 
to  call  on  M.  Ampere,  and  M.  Ballanche,  and  Monsieur  R^amier,  and  to  tell 
them  I  will  write  in  a  few  days,  and  that  I  am  ashamed  of  not  having  done  it 
sooner.  The  fact  is  that  at  Florence  my  time  was  entirely  taken  up  with 
researches  in  the  libraries,  etc.  Since  I  have  been  here  I  have  made  a  scruple 
of  writing;  a  line  until  I  had  finished  my  never-ending  preface,  which  is  draw- 
ing to  a  close  now.  But  a  few  days  after  my  arrival  I  was  seized  with  a  ner- 
vous malaise,  without,  however,  experiencing  any  of  those  alarming  symptoms 
which  accompanied  this  summer's  attack  of  fever ;  only  I  was  incapable  of  any 
sort  of  work,  and  quite  in  harmony  with  the  public  mind  here,  which  was  all 
turned  towards///^  and  ioUificatjons," 


'  194  I^if^  <^^d  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

The  fivsi  fete  that  he  assisted  at  was  a  Low  Mass  celebrated 
by  the  Pope  at  the  Church  of  St.  Apollinarius.  He  describes 
the  church  as  decorated  with  draperies  of  red,  white,  and 
blue,  embroidered  in  silver  and  gold,  and  illuminated  with 
countless  lustres,  candelabras,  and  torches. 

"  These  decorations  are  apt  to  shock  us  at  first,"  he  remarks,  "accustomed 
as  we  are  to  the  naked  majesty  of  the  Gothic  churches,  and  yet  there  is  some- 
thing joyous  and  pleasing  about  them.  They  are  suited  to  a  people  who  treat 
more  tenderly  and  familiarly  with  God,  and  they  have  the  appearance  of  a 
family  rejoicing.  It  was  indeed  at  a  fete  of  this  sort  that  we  were  about  to 
assist.  The  students  of  the  Seminary  *  were  drawn  up  on  either  side  of  the 
door  in  silence,  but  with  faces  all  alight  with  pleasure.  At  a  quarter-past 
eight  the  bells  rang  out,  and  the  Pope  entered  with  a  small  cortege.  He  wore 
a  white  soutane,  and  carried  his  scarlet  hat  in  his  hand.  He  said  a  Low  Mass, 
assisted  only  by  four  priests,  slowly  and  with  great  fervor.  At  the  moment  of 
the  Communion  all  the  Seminarists  approached  two  and  two  and  received 
Holy  Communion  from  the  hand  of  the  Holy  Father,  who  looked  in  truth  like 
a  father  in  the  midst  of  his  children.  Up  to  this  point  it  was  all  most  edify- 
ing, but  it  became  sublime  when  the  Pope,  having  given  Communion  to  all  the 
ecclesiastics,  expressed  the  desire  to  distribute  it  to  the  people.  Then  the 
guards  fell  back,  and  the  Sovereign  Pontiff  descended  the  steps  of  the  altar, 
holding  the  Blessed  Sacrament  in  his  hands.  At  tlie  same  moment  there  was 
a  forward  movement  in  the  crowd  to  meet  him  and  fall  down  before  the  Com- 
munion-rails, The  steps  were  covered  with  two  rows  of  the  faithful,  crushed 
together,  trembling,  overcome  to  tears;  no  distinction  of  any  sort.  There 
was  there  the  Queen  Dowager  of  Saxony,  poor  Italian  peasants,  women  and 
men  of  many  nations,  and,  in  the  midst  of  the  crowd,  my  Amelie  and  I  side 
by  side,  as  we  have  ever  been  in  joy  and  sorrow,  as  we  trust  to  be  to  the  end 
of  life,  and  beyond  it.  .  .  .  The  sacred  procession  drew  near  to  us.  I 
beheld  that  admirable  countenance  of  Pius  IX.  all  illuminated  by  the  torches, 
aglow  with  the  sanctity  of  the  act,  the  moment— nobler,  gentler  than  ever. 
I  kissed  his  ring,  the  ring  of  the  fisherman,  which  for  eighteen  centuries  has 
sealed  so  many  immortal  deeds.  Then  I  tried  to  see  no  more,  to  forget  every- 
thing, in  order  to  remember  only  Him  who  is  our  Master,  and  before  whom 
Pontiffs  are  but  dust." 

Every  letter  that  Ozanam  writes  from  Rome  is  marked  with 
tender  enthusiasm  for  Pius  IX.  He  describes  his  person  as 
"  well  adapted  to  his  glorious  role  of  popularity ;  his  figure 
is  lofty  and  well-formed,  his  face  slightly  colored,  and,  as  he 
is  but  fifty-four  years  of  age,  he  would  still  look  young  if  it 
were  not  for  the  gray  that  has  begun  to  streak  his  hair,  and 

*  St.  Apollinarius  is  the  ctiMrch  of  the  Seminarists  in  Rome« 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  195 

the  wrinkles  which  already  testify  to  the  burden  of  the  Pon- 
tificate. They  say  that  he  is  greatly  changed  since  his  elec- 
tion, but  what  has  not  changed  is  the  expression  of  his  face. 
I  never  saw  so  much  nobleness,  innocence,  and  sweetness 
combined.  When  he  speaks  he  is  quickly  moved,  and  his 
emotion,  his  penetrating  voice,  stirs  all  hearts."  Their  joyous 
sojourn  in  the  Holy  City  was  for  a  time  clouded  by  the  sud- 
den death  of  a  young  brother  of  Am^lie's,  to  whom  they  were 
both  much  attached. 

"The  terrible  news  reached  us  just  as  we  were  finishing  a  Novena  for  his 
recovery.  .  .  .  Our  beloved  brother  died  like  a  martyr,  after  living  like  a  saint. 
At  the  age  of  three-and-twenty  he  took  leave  of  this  world,  I  do  not  say 
with  resignation,  but  with  a  Divine  joy.  He  leaves  a  terrible  void  in  his  family, 
to  whom  his  sufferings  were  a  sorrow,  but  whom  he  consoled  by  his  virtues, 
his  serenity,  and  his  noble  intellect.  His  sister  has  not  yet  got  over  the  blow, 
and  for  the  last  twenty  days  my  one  care  has  been  to  support  her  under  this 
affliction." 

But  Easter  was  at  hand,  and  no  sorrow  in  Catholic  hearts 
could  withstand  the  flood  of  consolation  which  it  brings,  with 
its  pomps  and  blessings  and  festal  glories.  Ozanam  grows 
quite  lyrical  in  his  letters  home  now  that  Easter  has  come. 

"  TO    M.    PROSPER   DUGAS.   . 

"  Rome,  Easter  Sunday,  1847. 

"...  This  is  the  moment  to  speak  to  you  of  the  Papacy,  now  that  I 
have  just  assisted  at  its  most  solemn  pageants,  and  am  still  under  the  spell  of 
the  emotion  called  up  by  that  most  thrilling  spectacle  which  is  to  be  seen  on 
earth,  the  papal  Mass  and  the  benediction  of  the  Urbi  et  Orbi.   .  .  . 

"On  Easter  Sunday  some  twenty  thousand  persons  assisted  at  Mass  (at  St. 
Peter's),  and  there  was  still  an  immense  space  free  for  the  ceremonies  ;  you  can- 
not conceive  anything  more  grand,  more  harmonious,  than  the  arrangement 
of  the  sacred  cortege  and  its  orocessions  from  the  throne  to  the  altar.  At  the 
moment  of  the  elevation,  when  the  Pope  turns  round  and  holds  up  the  blessed 
Host  and  the  precious  Blood,  and  all  the  orders  of  the  Church  represented 
by  their  chiefs  and  delegates,  all  the  Christian  nations  represented  by  their 
ambassadors,  their  penitents,  their  pilgrims,  are  prostrate  in  a  common  adora- 
tion ;  when  all  the  memories  of  Catholicism  are  gathered  round  this  altar, 
where  the  sovereign  pontiffs  have  offered  the  Sacrifice,  from  St.  Peter,  whose 
tomb  is  underneath,  to  those  generations  of  popes  and  saints  of  all  times  en- 
tombed below  the  pavement  of  the  basilica — oh  !  then,  my  friend,  one  is  con- 
scious of  an  infinite  joy  in  seeing  thus  worthily  honored  our  God,  so  often 


196  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

disowned  and  outraged.  Heretics  and  schismatics  who  happen  to  be  present 
are  not  proof  against  the  impression  ;  you  see  them  bow  their  heads  with  the 
rest,  and  sometimes  exclaim  involuntarily,  '  How  beautiful  1 '  But  how  shall 
I  describe  to  you  what  I  beheld  and  felt  when,  Mass  being  finished,  the  great 
doors  opened  to  pour  forth  the  multitude  on  the  piazza,  already  covered  with 
an  enormous  crowd  ? — for  it  is  calculated  that  over  sixty  thousand  men  were 
assembled  there,  waiting  for  the  blessing  !  The  country  people  came  flocking 
in  in  their  picturesque  costumes ;  the  soldiers  stood  under  arms,  and  an  im- 
mense concourse  of  Romans,  who  are  not  in  the  habit  of  following  these  cere- 
monies, were  present  this  year  in  honor  of  the  first  Easter  of  Pius  IX. 

"  And  yet,  when  the  Pope  appeared  on  the  balcony,  accompanied  by  the 
cardinals,  all  was  hushed  into  a  silence  so  sudden,  so  deep,  so  universal  that 
you  heard  from  beginning  to  end  every  word  of  the  prayers  uttered  by  the 
Pontiff,  until  the  moment  when  he  rose,  with  an  indescribable  majesty,  and 
blessed  the  city  and  the  world,  and  then  from  every  point  of  the  vast  piazza 
there  resounded,  Amen  !  It  was  the  grandest  act  of  faith  I  ever  witnessed  in 
my  life. 

"  The  religious  ceremony  was  barely  concluded  when  the  populace  could  no 
longer  contain  itself,  and,  what  was  never  known  under  the  preceding  ponti- 
ficate, vivats  burst  forth,  handkerchiefs  and  hats  were  waved,  and  the  hearts 
of  the  people  seemed  carried  away  by  an  immense  love.  The  civic  guard 
wanted  to  put  their  shakos  on  the  end  of  their  guns  and  genuflect,  and  thus 
render  to  Pius  IX.  a  military  honor  that  was  only  given  to  Napoleon  ;  but  the 
Pope,  being  informed  of  this  intention,  forbade  any  political  demonstration 
to  be  mingled  with  what  was  entirely  a  sacred  solemnity.  Nevertheless  the 
civic  guard  waited  a  long  time  on  the  piazza,  amidst  an  enormous  crowd,  in 
hopes  of  being  able  to  salute  the  Holy  Father  when  he  passed  on  his  way 
back  to  the  Quirinal.  He  again  baffled  their  eagerness  by  delaying  his  return 
until  four  in  the  afternoon,  and  then,  when  his  carriage  appeared,  the  people 
made  a  rush  to  unyoke  the  horses,  and  when  the  Pope  forbade  this  they 
accompanied  him  to  the  Quirinal,  that  is  to  say,  more  than  half  a  league's  dis- 
tance, and  the  palace  square  was  instantaneously  flooded  with  a  countless 
multitude,  who  greeted  Pius  IX.  with  the  liveliest  acclamations.  He  had  to 
show  himself  again  on  the  balcony,  and  give  them  once  more  his  pontifical 
and  paternal  benediction.  The  evening  before  four  hundred  young  men, 
with  lighted  torches,  assembled  under  his  windows,  to  sing  him  a  cantata,  and 
wish  him,  according  to  the  pious  custom  of  the  country,  a  happy  Easter.  The 
evening  before  that  again,  as  he  wished,  over  and  above  the  official  washing 
of  the  feet,  to  ^o  and  wash  the  feet  of  the  poor  at  the  Pilgrims'  Hospital,  when 
he  went  out  the  streets  were  illuminated,  as  if  by  magic,  as  he  passed  along. 
The  people  did  what  they  are  in  the  habit  of  doing  for  the  Viaticum  when  it 
is  carried  at  night  :  everybody  went  to  the  door  or  stood  at  the  window  with  a 
lamp  in  their  hand.  But  these  lamps  that  are  so  quickly  extinguished  are 
but  a  pale  symbol  of  the  ardent  love  of  the  people  for  their  bishops  and  their 
prince.   .   .   . 

"  You  are  aware  what  opposition  the  Pope  meets  with  from  a  portion  of  the 
Sacred  College,  the  Prelacy,  the  Roman  nobility,  and  the  diplomatic  body ; 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  197 

but  don't  fancy  he  is  as  isolated  as  people  would  make  out.  He  has  rallied  to 
his  views  some  of  the  cardinals  who  are  held  in  the  highest  veneration  for 
their  virtues  and  their  capacity  ;  little  by  little  he  is  reforming  the  Court,  where 
he  had  so  many  adversaries. 

"There  is  less  to  build  on  with  the  laity,  hitherto  unacquainted  with  busi- 
ness, eind  with  their  political  education  yet  to  be  acquired,  so  as  to  fit  them  for 
a  suitable  place  in  the  government  or  the  administration.  This  is  what  Pius 
IX.  is  strenuously  aiming  at,  to  get  as  many  laymen  as  possible  into  the  dif- 
ferent consultative  commissions  which  he  has  formed,  and,  what  is  more  de- 
cisive, in  forming  the  tribunal  of  censure,  recently  instituted,  of  om  ecclesias- 
tic andyi>«r  laymen. 

"This  institution  has  attracted  great  notice,  and  given  umbrage  to  some 
impatient  spirits,  who  were  for  a  brusque  declaration  of  the  liberty  of  the 
Press. ,  Two  men,  however,  who  enjoy  the  full, confidence  of  the  party  of  pro- 
gress. Professor  Orioli  and  M.  d'Azeglio,  have  taken  up  the  defence  of  the 
edict  of  censorship,  and  shown  what  kindness  there  is  in  a  measure  which 
tolerates  the  discussion  of  all  matters  of  public  administration,  where  the 
mutual  control  of  five  p>ersons  is  substituted  for  the  arbitrary  censorship  of  one, 
and  which  points  out  the  cases  where  publication  may  be  stopped,  so  that  out- 
side these  special  cases  the  censorship  cannot  interfere  with  a  writer.  Opinion 
is  accordingly  begiuning  to  veer  round  towards  the  measure,  and  to  under- 
stand that  it  enters  perfectly  into  the  policy  of  Pius  IX.,  a  policy  of  reforma- 
tion always,  but  never  of  revolution. 

"  Thus  it  is  that  he  has  dismissed  no  one,  but  has  profited  by  the  death  of 
several  magistrates  to  suppress  their  places.  .  .  .  Thus  again  it  is  that, 
instead  of  suppressing  some  religious  orders,  which  were  useless  but  not 
scandalous,  he  forbade  them  to  receive  novices.     .     .     . 

•*  Traits  like  these  testify  to  the  wisdom  of  a  Sovereign  who  is  as  benign  as 
he  is  wise.  I  could  cite  you  plenty  of  others  which  prove  him  to  be  a  holy 
prelate,  a  zealous  priest,  a  saint  in  fact.     .    .     . 

"  He  has  resumed,  one  by  one,  all  the  active  functions  of  the  episcopacy — 
preaching,  giving  confirmation,  visiting,  incognito,  schools  and  hospitals,  and 
the  poor  in  their  garrets,  going  to  say  Mass  in  any  obscure  chapel,  and  dis- 
tributing Communion  to  all  who  are  present,  as  my  wife  and  I  had  the  happi- 
ness of  receiving  it  from  him.  And,  with  all  this,  a  purity  of  life  that  was  the 
admiration  of  those  who  knew  him  as  a  young  priest,  and  a  charity  so  bound- 
less that  when  he  set  out  to  come  to  the  Conclave  he  was  obliged  to  borrow 
six  hundred  crowns  for  his  journey,  .  .  .  But  what  strikes  one  above 
everything  else  in  him  are  those  two  sentiments  that  have  made  the  greatness 
of  all  great  Popes — an  immovable  faith  in  the  Divine  authority  vested  in  him, 
and  a  profound  conviction  of  his  unworthiness ;  a  trust  in  God  that  enables 
him  to  undertake  everything,  and  a  contempt  for  himself  that  enables  him  to 
suffer  everything  ;  hence  the  auriole  of  sanctity  which  illuminates  his  counte- 
nance, and  that  burning  accent  which  pervades  his  discourse. 

"We  had  the  honor  of  being  received  in  a  private  audience.  His  Holiness 
made  ray  wife  sit  down,  and  caressed  and  blessed  my  little  daughter  of 
eighteen  mouths.    He  spoke  to  us  of  France,  of  the  youth  of  our  schools,  of 


198  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

the  duties  of  professorship,  with  a  nobility,  an  emotion,  and  a  charm  that  are 
indescribable.  When  I  said  that  the  deserved  popularity  of  his  name  would 
hasten  the  return  of  public  feeUng  towards  Catholicism,  *  I  know,'  he  replied, 
'  that  God  has  worked  that  miracle,  and  that  prejudice  against  the  Holy  See 
has  suddenly  given  way  to  respect  and  love  ;  but  what  utterly  confounds  me 
is  that  He  should  have  made  use  of  a  wretch  like  me  to  effect  this  change.' 

"...  I  must  tell  you,  since  in  your  quality  of  father  you  will  under- 
stand my  pride,  that  our  little  Marie  behaved  herself  like  a  little  angel.  See- 
ing her  mother  and  me  kneel  down  before  the  Pope,  she  knelt  down  too  of 
her  own  accord,  clasped  her  small  hands  with  an  air  of  veneration  ;  and  the 
Holy  Father  was  so  delighted  that  three  or  four  days  afterwards  he  conde- 
scended to  allude  to  it  in  speaking  about  us  to  a  French  priest  :  '  They  brougiit 
me  their  little  child,  who  was  quite  charming ;  the  dear  Httle  thing  went  down 
on  her  knees,  and  looked  up  at  me  as  if  I  were  the  good  God  ! ' 

"And  don't  you  think  she  was  right,  my  little  Marie  ?  and  that  she  recog- 
nized truly  the  representative  of  Him  who  said,  '  Suffer  the  little  ones  to  come 
unto  Me '  ? " 

Immediately  after  Easter  Ozanam  started  off  alone  to 
\y  Monte  Cassino  to  make  some  researches  in  the  fine  library  of 
the  monks.  The  hurried  expedition,  the  strain  of  the  long 
day  spent  deciphering  and  copying  from  the  old  parch- 
ments, together  with  the  intense  cold  of  the  monastery, 
brought  on  a  return  of  the  feverish  attack  he  had  suffered 
from  at  Florence. 

"I  started  off  by  diligence  from  Naples,  and  returned  in  the  same  way, 
passing  two  nights  on  the  road,  and  only  thirty-six  hours  at  the  Abbey,"  he 
writes  to  his  brother  on  the  29th  of  April.  "  If  I  had  been  enticed  there  solely 
by  a  passion  for  art,  I  should  certainly  have  been  cruelly  disappointed.  In  a 
place  which  one  expects  to  find  full  of  the  traces  of  Christian  antiquity,  you 
find  only  a  church  of  the  eighteenth  century,  rich  in  marbles  and  gilding,  but 
without  a  single  painting  or  statue  of  any  value.  Fortunately  I  was  able  to 
communicate  at  the  tomb  of  St.  Benedict,  and  I  came  upon  all  the  Benedic- 
tine traditions  in  the  admirable  library  of  the  Abbey,  and  amongst  the  learned 
monks,  who  did  me  the  honors  of  it.  They  showed  me  some  precious  manu- 
scripts, from  which  I  made  extracts  ;  this  will  not  be  the  least  valuable  part  of 
my  literary  booty.  But  these  good  monks,  who  know  so  many  things,  don't 
I  know  how  to  warm  themselves,  and  I  nearly  died  of  cold  in  their  fine  archives, 
and  came  away  with  an  uncomfortable  feeling,  which  end«d  in  an  attack  of 
fever  when  I  got  to  Rome.  Happily  it  only  lasted  a  day,  and  allowed  me  to 
go  in  a  tolerably  fit  state  to  the  audience  which  the  Sovereign  Pontiff  kindly 
granted  me  on  the  Monday  evening.  I  had  to  thank  him  for  the  support 
which  he  condescended  to  lend  me  in  my  researches,  and  I  wished  to  offer  him 
my  book,  and  also  to  present  to  him  some  letters  for  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  199 

de  Paul.  It  was  nine  o'clock  when  I  was  admitted,  and  the  Pope  seemed  very 
tired  with  the  business  he  had  been  getting  through  with  his  minister  and 
several  public  functionaries.  His  Holiness,  nevertheless,  received  me  with  a 
cordiality  that  touched  me  deeply ;  he  enquired  after  my  health,  that  of  my 
wife,  and  my  little  girl,  in  a  tone  of  the  most  charming  friendliness  and  famili- 
arity. Seeing  him  so  kind  towards  me  and  mine,  I  ventured  to  speak  to  him 
of  my  brothers,  of  the  one  who  is  a  priest,  and  I  asked  for  his  blessing  on 
both." 

One  last  delight  was  in  reserve  for  the  travellers. 

On  the  2ist  of  April  Rome  celebrated  the  2600th  year  of 
her  foundation.  The  people  solemnized  it  by  an  immense 
national  banquet ;  tables  were  laid  above  the  Thermae  of  Titus 
for  eight  hundred  guests,  while  two  thousand  persons  were  in- 
vited to  be  present,  seated  in  the  surrounding  space,  which 
was  ornamented  with  flTgs,  mottoes,  and  flowers.  The  dinner 
was  only  a  pretext,  for,  as  Ozanam  remarks,  "  the  handful  of 
dishes  served  would  not  have  frightened  the  sobriety  of  Curius 
and  Cato."  The  real  motive  of  the  gathering  was  the  speeches, 
the  harangues,  and  patriotic  songs,  with  which  the  precincts 
resounded  loud  and  long.  Many  eminent  men  were  present, 
amongst  them  Orioli,  the  famous  Professor,  and  Manzoni's 
son-in-law,  the  Marquis  d'Azeglio.  The  morning  after  this 
merry-making  a  piece  of  important  news  was  circulated 
through  Rome.  The  Pope  had  decreed,  in  a  circular  from 
Cardinal  Gizzi,  that  each  province  should  send  in  the  names 
of  three  notable  citizens,  amongst  which  the  Government 
would  choose  one  who  should  permanently  represent  the  pro- 
vince, and  furnish  such  information  as  was  needed  towards 
the  accomplishment  of  certain  reforms  in  its  municipal  insti- 
tutions. The  population  was  electrified  by  the  news,  and 
Ozanam  shall  describe  the  way  in  which  their  enthusiasm  ex- 
pressed itself: 

•'  We  knew  nothing  of  this  event,  which  was  filling  the  whole  city,  and  we 
were  bitterly  regretting  the  only  thing  that  was  wanted  to  complete  the  de- 
light of  our  visit,  namely,  that  we  had  not  witnessed  one  of  those  striking 
popular  ovations  of  which  we  had  heard  so  often.  Amelie,  too.  was  inconso- 
lable at  having  to  leave  without  seeing  the  Pope  once  more,  and  carrying  away 
a  parting  blessing.    We  had  hoped  that  during  the  evening  we  ipight  hav^ 


200  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

met  him  out  walking,  as  it  had  happened  to  us  before,  but  this  hope,  like  so 
many  others,  was  disappointed.  We  were  just  coming  into  the  house  when  we 
were  informed  that  the  people  were  getting  ready  to  thank  the  Pope  for  his 
new  edict,  and  that  there  would  be  a  beautifuiy^V^  aux flambeaux.  We  swal- 
lowed our  dinner  as  quickly  as  possible,  and  then,  with  the  Abbe  Gerbet  and 
a  few  friends,  who  had  come  to  say  good-by  to  us,  we  hurried  to  the  Corso. 
The  rendezvous  was  at  the  Piazza  del  Popolo.  Torches  were  being  distributed, 
and  those  who  took  them  ranged  themselves  ten  abreast,  with  a  leader  of  the 
file.  But  the  crowd  was  so  great  that  we  could  only  get  a  little  above  the 
Church  of  St.  Charles.  There  we  were  able  to  see  the  outset  of  the  triumphal 
march.  It  opened  by  lines  of  men  with  lighted  torches ;  then  came  the  circu- 
lar of  Cardinal  Gizzi  printed  on  white  linen,  and  carried  aloft  like  a  large 
banner  ;  then  a  band  of  military  music  ;  then  a  dense  column  of  men  holding 
torches,  to  the  number,  it  is  estimated,  of  about  six  thousand.  Nothing  is 
more  striking  than  the  order  which  reigned  in  the  impromptu  army,  and  no- 
thing was  more  touching  than  to  see  walking  side  by  side,  in  the  same  ranks, 
men  of  the  highest  classes,  workmen  in  blouses,  priests  in  their  soutane,  many 
of  them  with  white  hair,  and  all  united  in  the  same  feeling,  expressed  in  the 
same  cry,  Viva  Pio  Nono  /  Viva  Gizzi!  This  is  the  first  time  I  ever  heard 
vivats  addressed  to  a  minister. 

"  As  the  cortege  advanced  to  the  Corso,  the  houses  were  illuminated  on  the 
road.  At  every  story  one  saw  the  windows  opening  and  people  bending  for- 
ward with  lamps  ;  frequently  there  were  lanterns,  colored  glasses,  flags  with 
mottoes,  and  thundering  cheers  were  interchanged  by  the  street  and  the  win- 
dows. .  .  .  After  following  the  crowd  to  the  Piazza  Colonna  we  rushed  off  by 
the  adjacent  streets,  in  order  to  reach  more  quickly  the  Piazza  of  Monte  Cavallo, 
whither  it  was  advancing.  The  Piazza  was  already  filled  with  people.  We 
were  so  fortunate  as  to  meet  with  some  persons  in  a  carriage,  who  invited 
Amelie  to  get  into  it.  I  stood  on  the  step,  and  we  were  thus  enabled  to  take 
in  the  whole  scene.  Presently  we  beheld  the  torch-bearers  approaching ;  the 
closely  packed  crowd  opened  to  make  way  for  them,  and  allowed  them  to  form 
themselves  into  a  square  in  front  of  the  Papal  palace.  In  the  centre  of  the 
square  was  the  edict  hoisted  like  a  banner,  and  the  music.  A  few  pieces  were 
played,  and  then  there  arose  a  great  shout  ;  lights  were  seen  passing  behind 
the  windows  of  the  palace  ;  they  advanced  slowly  to  the  window  of  the  bal- 
cony, which  opened,  and  the  Sovereign  Pontiff  came  forward,  accompanied 
by  two  prelates  and  a  few  servants  with  torches.  He  appeared  much  moved 
by  the  gratitude  that  was  being  shown  to  him,  and  bowed  to  the  right  and  left 
with  his  habitual  grace.  The  liveliest  acclamations  answered  him  on  every 
side  ;  women  waved  their  kerchiefs  and  men  their  hats  ;  there  was  clapping  of 
hands,  and  never-ending  cries  of  Viva  Pio  Nono!  It  was  not  the  watchword 
of  a  hackneyed  official  ovation  ;  they  knew  well  that  they  must  ask  that  he 
may  live,  and  that  the  highest  interests  of  Italy  and  the  world  are  bound  up 
in  his  life.  But  what  touched  me  most  of  all  was  this  :  The  Pope  made  a 
sign,  and  suddenly  you  heard  the  word  isitto  (hush)  !  On  every  side,  and  in 
less  than  a  minute,  the  most  profound  silence  had  fallen  on  the  excited  multi- 
lyde.    You  could  hear  distinctljr  the  VQice  of  the  Pontiff  rgwsed  to  bless  hia 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  OzanaiH.  201 

people,  and  when  he  stretched  forth  his  hand,  and,  making  the  sign  of  the 
cross,  pronounced  the  solemn  words,  one  mighty  Amen  !  responded  from  end 
to  end  of  the  vast  piazza.  There  is  no  grander  spectacle  on  earth  than  that 
of  a  whole  city  thus  praying  with  its  Pontiff  in  the  deep  night-time,  under  the 
starlight  of  a  heavenly  sky.  And  what  shows  that  the  spectators  all  felt  it  to 
be  a  religious  rite,  the  moment  the  Pope  withdrew  from  the  balcony  the 
torches  were  extinguished,  and  the  scene  was  only  lighted  by  the  stray  urns 
of  blue  light  from  the  terraces  of  the  neighboring  palaces. 

"  The  idea  evidently  did  not  occur  to  anybody  to  continue  the  pleasure  of 
the  promenade  by  torchlight,  any  more  than  it  occurred  to  them,  amidst  so 
many  other  cries,  to  utter  one  iigainst  Austria,  Cardinal  Lambruschini,  or 
against  any  of  the  partisans  of  the  late  Government ;  nothing  that  displayed 
hatred  or  animosity,  nothing  but  respect  alone.  Nor  was  there  in  this  im- 
mense crowd,  with  carriages  and  horses  in  every  direction,  the  slightest  dis- 
order, not  a  single  booby  who  thought  fit  to  raise  a  panic  to  terrify  the  women 
and  children,  as  they  are  so  fond  of  doing  in  Paris ;  I  might  have  left  my 
little  Marie  and  her  nurse  walk  about  in  the  midst  of  it,  such  are  the  gentle- 
ness, dignity,  and  even  obligingness  of  the  people  here.  We  left  the  Piazza 
oi  the  Quirinal  with  the  last  lingering  groups  at  half-past  nine,  and  found  the 
streets  on  our  way  home  silent  and  deserted  as  at  midnight.  The  Romans 
had  lain  down  to  sleep  like  so  many  good  children  who  before  going  to  bed 
come  and  say  good -night  to  their  father," 


But  Ozanam  could  not  think  of  sleep ;  he  was  too  excit- 
ed by  the  spectacle  he  had  beheld,  and  by  the  novel  and 
wonderful  prospect  which  it  opened  out  in  the  future.  He 
lingered  for  some  time  at  the  foot  of  the  obelisk  in  the 
centre  of  the  piazza,  plunged  in  a  deep  and  happy  medita- 
tion. What  he  had  just  witnessed  appeared  to  him,  no  doubt, 
as  nothing  less  than  the  end  of  the  strife,  the  solution  of  the 
problem  which  had  been  distracting  Europe  for  more  than 
fifty  years.  For  over  half  a  century  Cliristendora  had  been 
invoking  liberty,  seeking  and  demanding  it  as  a  sacred  and 
imperative  right,  and  resolved  to  conquer  it  at  any  price. 
But  there  were  those  who  told  her  Ghe  could  only  do  this  on 
condition  of  renouncing  Christianity,  that  the  two  were  in- 
compatible; and  they  bade  her  choose,  but  she  could  not 
choose,  for  both  were  essential  to  '  her.  Society  rebelled 
against  this  creed  of  incompatibility,  and  swore  to  prove  it 
false-;  hence  the  rending  that  had  torn  it  so  long,  while  it  ex- 
hausted itself  in  the  passionate  effort  of  reconciliation.     And 


202  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozxnam. 

lo!  to-night,  this  very  hour,  here,  under  the  starht  sky  of  the 
city  of  the  Caesars,  the  reconcihation  had  taken  place ;  the 
old  antagonism  had  been  destroyed,  and  the  problem  solv- 
ed :  the  Vicar  of  Christ,  the  Pontiff  and  Prince  of  Christen- 
dom, had  taken  Liberty  by  the  hand,  and  signed  a  solemn 
covenant  with  her. 

Judging  by  the  light  of  subsequent  events,  and  of  the  pre- 
sent, we  cannot  repress  a  smile  as  we  watch  Ozanam  brooding 
in  silent  exultation  over  his  victorious  ideal.  We  are  often  at 
a  loss  to  understand  the  mixture  of  sound  philosophy,  shrewd 
sense,  and  Utopian  chimera  that  flourish  side  by  side  in  the 
minds  of  men  of  genius.  Ozanam  presents  one  of  those  in- 
teresting phenomena.  But  while  considering  the  paradoxes 
which  he  cherishes  so  complacently,  and  so  devoutly  beheves 
in,  we  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  he  was  in  reahty 
more  an  inhabitant  of  the  past  than  of  the  present.  He  lived 
in  the  middle  ages ;  it  was  from  them  that  he  took  his  idea  of 
democracy,  from  those  republics  which,  in  their  most  turbu- 
lent periods,  were  always  under  strong  religious  control,  and 
whose  democracy  was  as  different  from  the  anti- Christian 
and  pantheistic  democracy  of  the  present  age  as  the  wild 
follies  of  the  crusading  armies  were  from  the  hideous  license 
of  the  incendiaries  of  the  Commune.  He  lost  sight,  moreover, 
of  the  fact  that  the  republics  of  the  middle  ages  were  so  but 
in  name,  being  oligarchies  in  reality ;  the  people  talked  loud 
about  their  independence,  but  they  meekly  accepted  the  rule 
of  a  few  leaders.  It  is  only  on  this  condition,  through  the 
unity  engendered  amongst  the  multitude  by  the  influence  of 
one  governing  mind  and  will,  that  democracy  can  be  main- 
tained in  its  most  modified  form.  No  State  can  be  secure  or 
stable  that  is  not  cemented  by  this  unity.  Happily  for  the 
peace  of  the  world,  mankind  knows  this,  and  instinctively  acts 
upon  it;  men  are  gregarious,  and  must  have  a  leader,  who  is 
king  for  the  time  being,  by  whatever  name  he  may  be  called. 

Ozanam's  idea  was  that  religion   would  constitute  this  co- 
hesive element  in  the  State,  that  the  Church  would  create  the 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozajiam.  203 

bond  of  unity  which  would  enable  society  to  govern  itself. 
He  was  a  confirmed  optimist  in  his  estimate  of  the  goodness 
and  governableness  of  mankind  in  general,  and  French  man- 
kind in  particular;  we  see  this  in  his  frequent  and  tender 
apologies  for  "  the  poor  devils  who  are  beguiled  to  the  barri- 
cades, but  who  are  Christians  at  heart,  and  ready  to  melt  at  a 
word  of  kindness."  Such  a  republican  carries  his  ideal  repub- 
lic in  his  head,  losing  sight  of  the  one  that  will  really  result 
from  an  attempt  to  realize  his  ideal — a  republic  of  violence, 
bloodshed,  and.  disorder,  over  which  he  and  his  views  will 
have  no  influence,  a  thing  going  from  one  excess  to  another, 
led,  or  lured,  or  driven  by  the  most  wicked  men,  who  are  al- 
ways the  foremost  and  most  aggressive,  until  finally  it  is 
crushed  by  some  new  despotism  in  arms.  Ozanam,  likd 
other  men  of  genius,  was  so  satisfied  with  the  theoretical  per- 
fection of  his  ideal  tiiat  he  was  blind  to  the  presence  of  un- 
derlying elements,  which  would  work  out  to  results  the  very 
opposite  of  those  he  looked  for.  He  was  quite  right  in  as- 
serting that  he  was  no  politician  in  the  practical  sense  of  the 
word ;  his  theories  were  indeed  lofty  and  beautiful,  but,  ex- 
cept as  applied  to  social  questions,  they  were  absolutely  in- 
applicable to  the  Europe  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

He  applauded  the  policy  of  Pius  IX.  the  more  enthusias- 
tically that  he  fancied  he  saw  in  it  the  realization  of  Iiis  own 
political  creed.  He  was  a  republican,  not  only  because  he 
held  a  republic  to  be  the  best  form  of  government,  but  be- 
cause he  believed  it  was  that  to  which  all  nations  were  gradu- 
ally, some  unconsciously,  others  reluctantly,  but  all  inevita- 
bly, tending.  He  saw  the  day  fast  approaching  when  the 
people  would  be  the  ruling  power  in  every  State ;  it  was  es- 
sential, therefore,  if  the  world  was  to  be  well  governed  that 
the  people  should  be  Christianized ;  otherwise  they  would  de- 
stroy and  subvert  all  authority.  Democracy  appeared  to  him 
like  the  rising  tide  which  no  power  on  earth  can  stay,  can 
bid  "  Thus  far  and  no  farther  ";  it  depended  on  the  present 
rulers  of  Europe — kings,  statesmen,  and  politicians — whether 


204  ^if^  ^'^^^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

it  was  to  be  a  wave  that  would  peacefully  float  society  ovei 
that  crisis  which  is  inevitable  in  every  transition  from  an  old 
order  of  things  to  a  new,  or  whether  it  was  to  be  a  destroying 
torrent  that  would  sweep  all  before  it  in  ruin  and  desolation. 
Rome  was  now  threatened  by  this  rising  tide,  and  though 
Ozanam  distinctly  recognized  the  fact,  he  did  not  discern  at 
this  moment  how  deeply  the  waters  were  poisoned  at  their 
source.  On  one  hand,  Russia,  with  the  schism  of  the  Greek 
Church  and  the  encroaching  policy  of  the  Czars,  marching 
steadily  on  to  Constantinople,  to  the  possession  of  eastern 
Europe,  was  a  perpetual  menace.  Austria,  on  the  other 
hand,  was  a  hostile  force  which  had  been  jealously  working 
against  the  Pontiff  from  the  moment  of  his  election ;  his 
grand  scheme  of  reform  and  his  erect  attitude  of  independence 
alarmed  and  offended  the  Cabinet  of  Vienna,  and  it  lay  in 
wait  to  seize  any  pretext  that  might  present  itself  for  creating 
a  disturbance  in  the  Papal  territory,  for  aiding  and  abetting 
the  slightest  show  of  disaffection  amongst  the  people.  The 
secret  societies  were  spread  like  a  net  all  over  the  country, 
breathing  hatred  to  Christianity  and  all  that  represented  it ; 
the  Pope,  who  was  emancipating  his  people  from  the  oppres- 
sive and  retrograde  system  that  had  weighed  on  them  so 
long,  admitting  laymen  to  office,  proclaiming  the  Constil/a, 
reforming  every  department  of  the  State,  and  this  without  vio- 
lence or  any  irritating  coercive  measures — the  Pope  was  rep- 
resented as  their  worst  enemy,  the  enemy  of  all  progress  and 
liberty,  the  secret  canker  of  Italy,  which  would  never  be  free 
until  she  was  delivered  from  him.  Then  there  was  the  in- 
tense desire  to  drive  the  Russians  out,  which  complicated 
everything;  the  Father  of  Christendom  could  not  make  war 
on  them,  for  "  they  too  were  his  children." 

Pius  IX.  saw  all  these  things,  but  without  alarm  or  mis- 
trust. He  loved  his  people  and  his  country  more  sincerely, 
and  far  more  wisely,  than  any  of  the  "  patriots  "  who  were 
accusing  him,  than  any  Mazzini  who  sought  to  serve  both  by 
the  dastardly  weapons  of  assassination  and  calumny  ;  he  saw 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  205 

the  evils  that  existed  and  those  that  threatened,  but  he  saw 
them  with  the  undaunted  courage  of  a  man  who  seeks  his  in- 
spirations  higher  than  in  the  counsels  of  this  world.  Ozan- 
am lived  to  see  the  failure  of  the  Pontiff's  noble  and  generous 
efforts,  but  he  never  lost  faith  in  their  essential  tightness  and 
ultimate  success;  he  did  not  join  with  those  who  turned  on 
freedom  and  cursed  it  as  a  viper  whose  first  use  of  its  restor- 
ed vitality  is  to  sting  the  breast  that  cherished  it;  he  held 
firm  in  his  belief  that  Pius  IX.  had  done  well  in  holding  out 
his  hand  to  Liberty,  and  embracing  her  as  the  natural  and 
powerful  helpmate  of  religion.  The  result  shocked  and  pained 
but  did  not  bewilder  him  or  throw  him  into  despair.  Even  in 
those  sanguine  days  of  the  young  pontificate  he  was  prepared 
for  evil  times  following.  He  said  at  a  public  meeting  on  his 
return  from  Rome : 

*'  I  believe  firmly  the  future  has  serious  troubles  in  store  for  Pius  IX, ;  I  be- 
lieve it  for  his  greater  glory.  God  does  not  raise  up  such  men  for  ordinary 
difficulties.  If  this  great  Pontiff  had  only  to  cope  with  the  over-enthusiasm, 
the  eagerness  of  his  f>eople — a  thing  that  so  few  princes  have  to  complain  of — 
his  mission  would  be  an  easy  one  ;  it  would  fill  too  small  a  place  in  history  ; 
his  bark  would  glide  over  tranquil  waters.  We  must  look  out  for  the  temp>est. 
But  let  us  not  fear,  like  the  disciples  of  little  faith  :  Christ  is  in  the  boat,  and  / 
He  is  not  sleeping ;  never  has  He  been  more  wakeful  than  in  these  present  i 
days." 

But  with  all  his  desire  to  hold  the  balance  even,  the  scales 
dipped  sensibly  to  the  side  of  hope,  of  jubilant  expecta- 
tion. 

♦•  The  first,  the  strongest,  the  sweetest  of  my  hopes  rests  on  the  Pope  him- 
self," he  says.  "  When  God  wishes  to  bring  forth  great  events  in  the  Chris- 
tian world,  He  begins  by  sowing  the  seed  of  saints  there.  A  few  years  ago  a 
preacher  who  has  the  gift  of  inspired  language  was  evangelizing  the  youth  of 
France  from  the  pulpit  of  Notre  Dame ;  casting  a  sorrowful  glance  over 
modem  Europe,  he  cried  out,  *  O  God,  give  us  saints  I  it  is  long  since  we 
have  seen  any  !'  Let  us  rejoice  ;  Heaven  has  granted  more  than  we  asked. 
It  has  seated  on  the  chair  of  St.  Peter  a  saint  such  as  the  world  has  not  seen 
since  the  pontificate  of  Pius  V.  .  .  .  This  sanctity,  which  illuminates  his 
countenance,  permeates  his  life  and  all  his  actions,  and  as  it  is  the  best  part 
of  his  authority,  so  it  is  the  principle  of  all  his  reforms.  People  were  greatly 
mistaken  as  to  the  intentions  of  Pius  IX.     Some  took  him  for  a  weak  sover- 


2o6  Life  arid  IVorks  of  Frederic  Ozaiiam.  ' 

eign,  conquered  by  popularity  ;  others  for  a  clever  politician,  gained  over  to 
the  opinions  of  his  age.  But  he  himself,  pouring  out  his  heart  to  a  friend, 
confessed  that  in  proclaiming  the  amnesty  he  had  thought  only  of  all  the 
hearts,  led  astray  by  political  hatred,  whom  this  free  pardon  might  win  back 
to  God.  And  they  proved  he  was  not  mistaken  when,  a  few  weeks  afterwards, 
a  great  number  of  the  subjects  of  the  amnesty  assembled  at  the  basilica  of  St. 
Peter's  Chains,  and  went  to  Communion  together,  as  if  to  publicly  proclaim 
their  return  to  a  religion  of  clemency.  So  it  was  with  the  institution  of  the 
Civic  Guard,  which  astonished  and  alarmed  half  the  Cabinets  of  Europe,  but 
which,  in  the  intention  of  the  Pope,  was  nothing  but  an  energetic  measure 
against  idleness,  that  is  to  say,  against  the  chief  moral  plague  of  Italy.  In 
placing  under  arms  the  immense  crowd  of  idlers  that  encumber  the  towns  and 
the  country  districts,  in  subjecting  them  to  the  fatigue  of  military  exercises 
and  discipline,  he  not  only  snatched  them  from  the  temptations  of  idleness, 
he  formed  them  to  work.  People  fancied  he  was  raising  soldiers  for  himself, 
while  he  was  solely  bent  on  forming  citizens.  ,  ,  ." 

The  Consulta^  the  decree,  the  provoked,  the  magnificent 
popular  ovation  which  Ozanam  describes  on  the  eve  of  his 
leaving  Rome,  was  in  itself  a  giant  stride  in  the  road  of  re- 
form. Three  deputies  from  every  town  did  not  constitute  a 
Parliament,  but  they  made  the  beginning  of  one;  and  those 
who  were  wise  looked  on  approvingly  at  the  sagacious  slow- 
ness of  the  Sovereign  Pontiff  in  thus  patiently  building  up  the 
edifice  of  reform  step  by  step,  instead  of  rushing  precipitately 
into  full-grown  institutions,  as  the  more  impatient  radicals 
wished  him  to  do.  Neighboring  nations  looked  with  amaze- 
ment at  these  liberal  proceedings,  and,  remembering  the  feats 
of  the  Commune  of  Paris,  argued  that  the  Pope  would  soon 
regret  his  concessions.  But  history  was  there  to  show  a  pre- 
cedent in  his  favor.  The  Consulta  had  roots  in  the  past,  and 
closely  resembled  a  consulting  legislative  body  composed  of  \ 
ecclesiastics,  founded  four  centuries  before  by  Nicholas  V., 
but  which  Pius  IX.  now  revived  under  secular  conditions 
adapted  to  the  needs  of  the  age.  The  Roman  population  so 
far  amply  vindicated  his  confidence  in  them.  It  was  a  noble 
spectacle  to  behold  them  leaping  at  one  bound  into  freedom 
without  violence  or  disorder,  without  the  slightest  offence 
against  moderation,  gentleness,  or  sobriety.  Ozanam,  who 
considered  it  with  the   eyes  of  a  poet  and  the  heart  of  a 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam.  207 

Christian  philosopher,  saw  in  "  this  revolution  with  flowers 
and  poetry,"  as  he  termed  it,  the  assured  triumph  of  his  own 
Utopian  dreams.  Europe  beyond  the  Alps,  accustomed  to 
revolutions  of  a  different  order,  and  achieved  with  different 
weapons,  looked  on  in  undisguised  astonishment  at  a  people 
inaugurating  their  liberty,  not  with  barricades  and  gunpowder, 
but  with  flowery  noonday  fesias  and  torchlight  processions. 
But  in  a  country  where  poetry  is  the  spontaneous  language  of 
popular  emotion,  how  could  it  be  absent  from  the  dawn  of  the 
national  freedom  ? 

"  Let  us  not  despise  those  populations  who  march  forth  to  liberty  through 
streets  garlanded  with  flowers  and  festooned  with  flags,  flaming  with  lights, 
resounding  with  choirs  of  music  and  hymns,"  cries  Ozanam.  "  Let  us  not 
shrug  our  shoulders  like  men  who  believe  only  in  the  power  of  the  sword. 
We  must  hope  great  things  from  a  f>eople  who  can  thus  adorn  the  first  hours 
of  their  emancipation  ;  who  are  content  with  little  ;  who  are  neither  blasis 
nor  tired  of  life  ;  whose  men  do  not  murder  one  another  through  vanity  or 
through  idleness  ;  a  people  who  have  small  experience,  but  a  vast  amount  of 
enthusiasm,  and  who  hold  firmly  to  faith,  which  is  the  true  principle  of  order, 
and  to  love,  which  is  the  true  principle  of  liberty." 

Ozanam  was  convinced  that  the  moral  strength  of  a  nation 
tnay  be  tested  by  the  amount  of  liberty  it  is  capable  of  bear- 
ing without  prejudice  to  order.  A  hunger  for  freedom  he 
held  to  be  a  sign  of  national  health ;  thus  it  followed  that 
where  others  saw  only  revolutionary  instincts  which  it  was  the 
duty  of  authority  to  crush,  he  recognized  salutary  inspirations, 
which  it  behoved  the  legislator  to  enlighten  and  direct.  The 
philosophy  of  history,  as  he  interpreted  it,  had  led  him  to  be- 
lieve that  there  is  no  real  meaning  or  character  in  the  move- 
ment of  human  society  unless  through  all  its  changes  and 
convulsions  we  can  discern  a  steady  and  continued  progress 
through  Christianity  to  the  dignity  of  freedom.  This  condition 
of  freedom,  which  he  held  so  essential  to  the  welfare  and 
happiness  of  communities,  he  considered  equally  indispensable 
to  the  Church.  He  was  consequently  intolerant  of  the  least 
bondage  for  her,  and  impatient  that  a  Christian  people  should 
tolerate  it,  when  at  the  same  time  they  were  perhaps  fighting 


2o8  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

manfully  for  the  emancipation  of  their  country.  If  the  Church 
were  free,  free  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word — free  to  guide, 
to  rule,  and  to  teach  mankind — then  all  legitimate  freedom 
would  follow. 

Immediately  after  Holy  Week  Ozanam  and  his  wife  left 
Rome,  and  began  a  little  tour  through  Italy  homewards. 
They  visited  all  the  shrines  that  lay  within  their  reach,  Sienna, 
Bologna,  Padua,  etc.,  and  beheld  everywhere  the  footprints 
of  genius  following  closely  on  the  track  of  sanctity.  "  It  seems," 
remarks  Ozanam,  ''  as  if  it  sufficed  to  bury  a  saint  somewhere 
for  all  the  arts  to  flower  out  in  that  spot."  But  of  all  the 
sanctuaries  which  they  visited,  none  delighted  them  so  much 
as  that  of  Assisi,  all  fragrant  as  it  is  with  the  memory  of  St. 
Clare  and  St.  Francis — sweet  St.  Francis,  who  made  such 
friends  with  the  doves  and  the  wild  beasts. 

Tiiey  arrived  at  Venice  late  in  May,  and  nothing  that 
Ozanam  had  yet  seen  in  this  land  of  wonders  and  of  beauty 
had  prepared  him  for  the  surprise  which  here  awaited  him. 
Night  was  falling,  and  the  long  canal  by  which  they  entered 
the  city  was  lighted  only  by  a  few  stars  overhead  and  the 
beacons  of  the  gondolas  that  shot  past  each  other  silent  and 
dark  in  their  black  draperies,  like  phantoms  gliding  over  the 
water.  As  they  advanced,  palaces  rose  on  every  side,  until 
the  gondola  turned  off  into  the  Httle  canal  that  conducted 
them  to  their  hotel.  After  a  hasty  refreshment  they  sallied 
forth  to  see  the  city  as  far  as  it  could  be  seen  by  night.  They 
went  at  once  to  the  Piazza;  it  was  flooded  with  light,  which 
magnified  its  size  to  immensity. 

Ozanam  says  he  did  not  see  this ;  he  dreamt  it,  and  ex- 
pected to  find  the  dream  vanish  when  he  awoke  at  day- 
break. 

"  It  was  ten  o'clock  ;  music  was  playing  on  every  side  ;  groups  of  young  men 
and  maidens  stopped  beneath  the  porticoes  to  ]isten.  1  began  to  realize  all  the 
subtle  danger  that  lurked  in  this  enchanted  life  of  ancient  Venice,  all  that 
made  the  charm  of  that  magic  city,  and  all  that  had  wrought  her  ruin,  .  .  , 
The  dream  returned  for  ten  mornings.  I  have  now  seen  the  sun  rise  ten 
times   over  Venice,  and  each  time   I   have  found  that  my  dream  has  not 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  209 

vanished.  Venice  has  performed  far  more  than  she  promised.  No  church  of 
Italy,  not  that  of  Pisa,  whose  fine  colonnades  I  so  loved,  nor  that  of  Orvielo, 
with  its  paintings  and  bas-reliefs,  nor  the  dome  of  St.  Vita!  of  Ravenna,  nor 
the  mosaics  of  St.  Apollinarius,  of  Sta.  Maria  Maggiore,  and  the  Cathedral  of 
Montreal,  no  religious  monument  so  far  has  struck  me  as  so  instructive  as  St. 
Mark,  which  combines  the  style  of  the  East  and  of  the  West,  and  whose  mo- 
saics contain  the  whole  history  of  Christendom,  while  the  inscriptions  that 
cover  its  walls  are  in  themselves  a  grand  religious  poem." 

Time  fled  swiftly  in  the  magic  city,  where  life  seemed  a 
dream,  gliding  in  gondolas  over  the  lagoons,  or  musing  by 
moonlight  on  the  shores  of  Lido,  listening  to  t'ne  waves  of  the 
Adriatic  as  they  sang  their  lullaby  to  the  stars.  There  were 
little  pilgrimages,  too,  to  adjacent  shrines,  monasteries,  and 
temples,  fragments  of  a  glory  and  a  prosperity  once  famous 
as  that  of  Venice  herself;  monks  still  haunted  them,  and  kept 
guard  over  that  sacred  deposit  of  the  past  which  had  survived 
decay — books,  unique  manuscripts,  statues,  pictures,  frescos. 
All  this  was  placed  freely  at  the  disposal  of  Ozanam.  But 
his  enjoyment  in  Venice  was  not  without  alloy. 

*'  I  saw  in  one  of  the  halls  of  the  palace,"  he  says,  *'  the  allegorical  figures 
of  Veronese  representing  with  pompous  devices  all  that  ever  made  the  power 
of  Venice:  Faith,  nunquam  dereltcta ;  Justice  and  Strength,  fundamentum 
rei'publica,  custodes  libertatis  ;  the  Navy,  robur  imperii  ;  and  that  liberty  was 
badly  guarded,  and  that  empire  badly  upheld.  In  the  great  council-hall  were 
ranged  the  portraits  of  the  Doges,  and,  after  the  last,  there  is  a  vacant  space 
for  those  that  were  to  follow.  On  the  piazza  are  the  three  masts,  stripped  of 
the  banners  of  the  three  kingdoms  that  once  made  the  glory  of  the  Republic, 
and  on  the  piazzetta  the  Austrian  cannons  and  Hungarian  grenadiers  are 
guarding  them." 

The  travellers  returned  home  early  in  July,  passing  through 
Switzerland  and  Belgium.  Ozanam's  health  was  to  all  ap- 
pearance restored,  and  he  was  impatient  for  the  re-opening 
of  his  cours  at  the  termination  of  the  holidavs. 


CHAPTER  XX. 

1847. 

We  shall  have  occasion  to  speak  of  Ozanam's  chief  works 
collectively,  but  meanwhile  we  cannoc  forbear  from  making 
special  mention  here  of  that  one  which  was  the  immediate 
fruit  of  this  journey  to  Italy.  Les  Poetes  Franciscains  was  pro- 
nounced by  several  contemporary  critics  "  a  pearl  without  a 
rival."  It  is  a  book  that  has  all  the  fascination  of  a  poem 
combined  with  the  reality  of  history ;  for  in  dealing  with  facts 
the  author  allows  himself  no  poetic  license.  Ozanam,  wan- 
dering through  the  gay  meadows  and  shadowy  towns  of 
Umbria,  thrust  his  hand,  as  he  says,  "  into  the  nest  whence 
the  eagles  of  Christian  poetry  were  destined  to  take  flight — 
Dante,  Petrarch,  and  Tasso." 

He  traces  the  poetic  ancestry  of  these  eagles  to  the  humble 
Franciscan  friars.  But  before  beginning  his  researches  in  the 
dim  twilight  of  mediaeval  cloisters  he  descends  into  the  gloom 
of  the  catacombs,  and  patiently  explores  their  testimony  ; 
here  every  broken  slab,  every  fragment  of  tomb  and  altar-stone, 
is  a  witness,  speaking  with  authority,  though  often  vaguely,  in 
the  obscure  language  of  symbolism  and  allegory. 

Following  our  guide  through  the  intricate  mazes  of  the  gal- 
leries, lined  with  tombs  and  shrines,  we  reach  the  point  where 
this  "mural  poetry  "  ceases;  the  poetic  idea  breaks  forth  in 
the  true  poetic  utterance  of  verse,  and  henceforth  speaks  no 
other.  Soon  we  hear  the  poet  Prudentius  celebrating  the 
catacombs  and  their  martyrs  in  the  metre  of  Virgil  and 
Horace.  Presently  a  new  school  of  poetry,  with  a  new  civi- 
lization, is  about  to  emerge  from  these  consecrated  vaults 
which  are  undermining  Rome : 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  211 

•'  While  the  walls  of  the  Eternal  City  are  shaken  by  the  battering-rams,  and 
the  Goths  and  Vandals  enter  by  the  breach  ;  while  the  barbarian  hordes  are 
sacking  it,  carrying  off  even  to  the  leaden  roofs  of  the  houses  and  the  brazen 
gates  ;  at  the  very  moment  when  all  seems  lost,  the  sacred  sepulchres  of  the 
catacombs  are  upheaving  through  the  soil,  and  produce  those  admirable 
basilicas  of  St.  Paul,  Sta.  Maria  Maggiore,  and  so  many  others,  which,  from 
the  fourth  to  the  thirteenth  century,  are  a  refuge,  a  shelter,  and  a  protection 
for  all  the  arts." 

They  find  another  refuge  in  the  popular  sympathies ;  the 
hymns  of  St.  Gregory  and  St.  Ambrose  are  on  the  lips  of  the 
people,  whose  simple  idiom  was  the  destined  vehicle  of  the 
poetic  current  whicli  broke  upwards  from  the  catacombs. 

"  The  fable  tells  us,"  says  Ozanam,  in  one  of  those  happy  images  that  were 
familiar  to  him,  "  that  Mercury,  when  a  child,  was  playing  one  day  by  the 
sea-shore,  and,  picking  up  a  tortoise-shell  from  amongst  the  pebbles  on  the 
beach,  he  began  to  play  upon  it,  and  thus  invented  the  first  lyre.  So,  like- 
wise, the  genius  of  Italy  picked  up  from  the  dust  at  her  feet  the  humble  idiom 
which  was  destined  to  be  her  immortal  instrument." 

What  charms  him  above  all  in  this  genius  is  that  in  becom- 
ing erudite  and  classical  it  does  not  cease  to  remain  popular; 
each  age  of  literature  has  its  poetry  of  the  people.  It  is  this 
rich  and  delicate  undergrowth  that  Ozanam  purposes  specially 
to  explore.  He  does  so  conscientiously,  leading  us  on  to  the 
thirteenth  century,  when  the  poet' of  Assisi  arose,  and,  taking 
up  the  rustic  instrument,  breathed  into  it  his  wondrous  inspi- 
rations, improvising  for  the  people  in  their  own  familiar  idiom 
that  incomparable  canticle  to  "  our  brother,  my  lord  the  Sun," 
which  marks  a  new  era  in  Italian  literature. 

We  know  the  story  of  the  poet's  early  life;  how  he  came  to 
be  called  Francis,  from  his  father's  predilection  for  France, 
where  he  was  travelling  with  his  merchandise  when  the  child 
was  born  ;  how  the  little  Francis  inherited  his  father's  fond- 
ness for  the  country  of  the  troubadours,  whose  language  was 
the  first  his  baby  tongue  was  taught  to  lisp.  It  was  the 
poetry  of  France  that  taught  him  the  first  notions  of  romance 
and  chivalry.  He  learned  there  that  there  were  two  kinds  of 
chivalry,  one  ierricnne^  or  earthly,  one  c^lestielle^  or  heavenly. 


212  Life  aiid  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

The  knights  of  the  celestielle  sought  glory  and  adventure,  but 
in  no  earthly  cause.  Tlieir  example  fired  the  ambition  of 
Francis.  At  the  age  of  twenty,  being  reputed  the  handsom- 
est cavalier  of  Assisi,  "  the  flower  of  its  youth,"  he  joined  the 
Crusaders,  and  went  forth  to  fight  the  infidel  at  Damieita ; 
and  having  thus  won  his  spurs  in  the  ranks  of  the  nobler 
knighthood,  he  sheathed  his  sword  and  returned  to  his  native 
land,  where  the  lady  of  his  love  awaited  him.  Slie  was  a 
mistress  of  cold  and  austere  mien,  beautiful  in  his  eyes  alone; 
but  he  loved  her,  and  gave  up  all  things  for  her  sake.  He 
served  her  with  a  life-long  devotion,  and  sang  to  her  in  accents 
whose  Divine  beauty  rises  far  beyond  the  reach  of  earthly 
passion  and  the  inspiration  of  mere  human  art.  Listen  to  his 
canticle  to  my  Ladye  Poverty  and  her  crucified  Spouse  : 

**  Lord  !  have  Thou  pity  upon  me,  and  upon  my  Ladye  Poverty  !  And 
behold  her  seated  on  a  dunghill ;  she,  who  is  the  queen  of  virtues,  she  com- 
plains because  her  friends  have  spurned  her,  and  liave  become  her  enemies. 
.  .  .  Remember,  Lord,  that  Thou  didst  come  down  from  the  abode  of  the 
angels,  in  order  to  take  her  for  Thy  spouse,  and  to  make  her  the  mother  of  a 
great  multitude  of  sons  who  should  be  perfect.  ...  It  was  she  who  received 
Thee  in  the  stable  and  in  the  manger,  and  who,  keeping  company  with  Thee 
all  through  life,  took  care  that  Thou  hadst  not  whereon  to  lay  Thy  head. 
When  Thou  didst  begin  the  war  of  our  redemption.  Poverty  attached  herself 
to  Thee  like  a  faithful  squire.  She  stood  by  Thy  side  during  the  combat ; 
she  did  not  forsake  Thee  when  Thy  disciples  fled. 

"When  at  last  Thy  mother,  who  followed  Thee  to  the  end,  and  took  her 
share  of  all  Thy  sorrows — when  even  Thy  mother  could  no  longer  reach  to 
Thee,  because  of  the  height  of  the  Cross,  my  Ladye  Poverty  embraced  Thee 
more  closely  than  ever.  She  would  not  have  Thy  Cross  carefully  fashioned, 
nor  the  nails  in  sufficient  number,  and  pointed  and  smooth,  but  prepared  only 
three,  which  she  made  blunt  and  rough,  that  they  might  better  serve  the  pur- 
pose of  Thy  torture.  Whilst  Thou  wert  dying  of  thirst  she  refused  Thee  a 
little  water,  so  that  Thou  didst  expire  clasped  in  the  embrace  of  this  Thy 
spouse. 

"  Oh !  who  then  would  not  love  my  Ladye  Poverty  above  all  other 
things  ?  " 

The  instinct  of  Catholicism  alone  can  furnish  the  key  to 
this  Divine  philosophy.  Each  age  has  its  prevailing  vice  as 
well  as  its  apparent  beauty.  The  love  of  riches,  the  passion 
for  gain,  w^g  th^  dis^asQ  of  tlie  a^e  of  Francis,  jind  he  wa§ 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  213 

raised  up  to  testify  against  these  evils,  and  recruit  an  army 
who  would  wage  war  on  avarice,  and  restore  to  her  throne 
"  the  queen  of  the  virtues,  who  was  seated  on  a  dunghill." 

This  lover  of  poverty  was  an  ardent  lover  of  nature.  When 
he  claimed  kindred  with  the  stars  and  the  flowers,  with  the 
sun  and  the  moon,  he  gave  utterance  to  his  strongest  human 
sympathies.  In  the  merry  days  of  his  cavalier  life  he  had 
filled  the  starlit  streets  of  Assisi  with  the  gay  ditties  and  soft 
ballads  of  his  native  land;  after  his  conversion  he  awoke  the 
echoes  of  the  woods  with  the  music  of  hymns  and  canticles. 
In  his  most  ascetic  days  this  predilection  for  music  was  never 
abandoned  or  condemned.  At  eventide  the  trilling  of  the 
nightingale  would  move  him  to  respond  in  an  outburst  of 
melodious  song,  and  the  two  would  keep  it  up  far  into  the 
night,  until  Francis,  exhausted  in  the  duet,  would  praise  his 
conqueror  for  being  so  indefatigable  in  the  praises  of  their 
common  Lord,  and  retire,  leaving  him  master  of  the  silence. 
Once,  when  worn  out  with  suffering  in  his  last  illness,  he 
longed  for  a  little  music  to  "  wake  up  joy  in  his  soul,"  but  the 
ascetic  rule  that  he  had  adopted  did  not  admit  of  this  re- 
laxation; the  angels,  however,  heard  his  heart's  desire,  and 
the  same  night,  as  he  lay  in  meditation  on  his  couch  of  pain, 
a  marvellous  harmony,  as  of  a  flute  of  unearthly  sweetness, 
filled  the  air.  No  musician  was  visible,  but  the  sounds  floated 
to  and  fro  2^s  of  some  one  passing  beneath  the  window. 
Francis,  entranced  by  the  music,  thought  for  a  moment  that 
he  had  passed  into  the  heavenly  spheres. 

He  encouraged  the  love  of  music  and  song  amongst  the 
people,  and  taught  them  his  own  sweet  poetry.  His  hymn  to 
"  Our  brother,  my  lord  the  Sun,"  became,  in  course  of  time, 
the  most  popular  in  the  land,  and  resounded  far  and  wide, 
from  dawn  to  sundown,  through  the  valleys  of  Umbria. 
Children  lisped  it  at  their  play,  women  sang  it  over  their 
household  work,  old  men  murmured  it  at  their  cottage-doors, 
until  the  sweet  strophes  rose  and  fell  through  the  sunny  woods 
and  vineyards,  unceasing  and  spontaneous  like  the  chirpings 


214  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

of  our  brothers  the  Uttle  birds  \  "  for,"  as  Ozanam  remarks, 
"  these  ItaUans,  who  can  go  without  clothes  or  food,  cannot 
do  without  song  and  poetry."  Though  the  canticle  is  so  well 
known,  we  will  give  an  imperfect  translation  of  it  here  for  the 
few  who  may  not  be  acquainted  with  it : 

"Most  high,  most  powerful  and  kind  Lord,  to  whom  belong  all  praise, 
glory,  and  benediction  !  They  are  due  to  Thee  alone,  because  of  all  creatures, 
and  chiefly  for  our  brother,  my  lord  the  sun,  who  giveth  us  the  day  and  the 
light !  He  is  beautiful,  and  shines  with  a  great  splendor,  and  bears  testimony 
unto  Thee,  O  my  God  ! 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  for  our  sister  the  moon,  and  for  the  stars  ! 
Thou  hast  formed  them  in  the  heavens,  bright  and  fair. 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  for  my  brother  the  wind,  for  the  air  and  the 
clouds,  for  the  calm  and  for  all  weathers  !  for  it  is  by  this  that  Thou  dost  up- 
hold all  creatures. 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  for  our  sister  the  water,  which  is  very  useful, 
humble,  precious,  and  chaste  ! 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  for  our  brother  the  fire  !  By  him  Thou 
dost  illumine  the  darkness  ;  he  is  beautiful  and  pleasant  to  see,  dauntless  and 
strong. 

"  Praised  be  my  Lord  for  our  mother  the  earth,  which  supports  and 
nourishes  us,  and  brings  forth  fruits  of  divers  sorts,  the  grass  of  the  field  and 
the  variegated  flowers  ! " 

One  day  there  arose  a  grievous  dispute  between  the  magis- 
trates of  Assisi  and  the  bishops.  St.  Francis  hearing  of  it  was 
sorely  distressed,  and  seeing  that  no  one  stood  forth  as  a 
peacemaker,  he  added  the  following  strophe  to  his  canticle : 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  because  of  those  who  forgive  for  Thy  sake,  and 
for  love  of  Thee  patiently  bear  infirmity  and  tribulation  !  Happy  they  who 
persevere  in  peace  I  for  they  shall  be  crowned  by  the  Most  High  ! ' 

He  then  desired  his  disciples  to  go  boldly  to  the  principal 
notabilities  of  the  town  and  beg  of  them  to  come  at  once  to 
the  bishops,  and  when  they  should  all  be  assembled  there,  to 
sing  in  two  choruses  before  the  disputants  the  newly  composed 
verse.  The  disciples  obeyed  him,  and  immediately,  when 
they  had  ceased  singing,  the  adversaries  asked  pardon  one  of 
another,  and  embraced,  with  many  tears. 

Sweet  St.  Francis !  Gentle  brother  of  the  flowers  and  the 
little  birds !     He  met  a  peasant  one  day  driving  two  lambs 


Life  a  fid  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  215 

to  the  slaughter;  it  was  mid-winter;  ihe  lover  of  poverty- 
had  only  one  cloak,  but  he  took  it  off  and  offered  it  to 
the  peasant  on  condition  that  he  would  spare  the  life  of  the 
lambs. 

He  cherished  the  wild  doves  in  his  breast,  he  tamed  the 
hungry  wolf,  he  called  the  robins  and  the  bullfinches  to  him, 
and  bade  them  sing  away  merrily  the  praises  of  God ;  then  he 
would  bid  them  be  silent  while  he  and  his  brethren  sang  in 
their  turn ;  they  obeyed,  and  when  the  monks  had  recited  the 
breviary  the  birds  burst  out  into  chirpings  again. 

But  the  time  had  come  for  Francis  to  leave  this  world  and 
join  in  the  songs  of  the  blessed.  Shortly  before  his  death  he 
fell  into  a  gentle  ecstasy,  and,  waking  from  it,  composed  a 
last  verse  to  his  canticle;  he  expired  while  the  brethren  were 
singing  it: 

"  Praised  be  Thou,  my  Lord,  because  of  our  sister,  the  death  of  the  body, 
from  which  no  man  can  escape  !  Woe  to  those  who  die  in  mortal  sin  1  Happy 
they  who  at  the  hour  of  death  are  conformed  to  Thy  holy  will  1  For  then  the 
second  death  cannot  hurt  them. 

"  Praise  and  bless  my  Lord,  give  Him  thanks,  and  serve  Hinn  with  greA 
humihty." 

The  poetic  mission  of  St.  Francis,  eclipsed  during  his  life- 
time by  loftier  and  graver  cares,  only  received  its  full  recog- 
nition in  the  century  after  his  death.  He  chose  for  his  grave 
a  hillside,  east  of  Assisi ;  it  was  the  place  where  public 
criminals  were  put  to  death,  and  was  called  the  Hill  of  Hell. 
Scarcely  had  his  dust  been  laid  in  this  unhallowed  spot  when 
some  mysterious  attraction  began  to  draw  the  minds  and 
hearts  of  men  there,  and  moved,  so  to  speak,  the  very  earth 
itself.  Gregory  IX.  placed  the  name  of  Francis  among  the 
saints,  and  decreed  that  the  place  of  his  sepulchre  should  be 
called  the  Hill  of  Paradise.  Henceforth  no  honors  were 
ereat  enough  for  the  beggar  bridegroom  of  my  Ladye  Poverty. 
The  nations  vied  with  each  other  in  bringing  tributes  of  re- 
spect to  his  grave.  He,  who  had  left  all  things  and  become 
an  outcast  for  God*s  sake,  soon  beheld  a  magnificent  abode 


2i6  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

rising  over  his  resting-place,  grander  than  any  palace  he  had 
dreamed  of  in  the  cavaHer  days  of  his  youth.  And,  as  if  a 
divine  inspiration  came  from  the  resting-place  of  the  artist 
saint,  those  who  drew  near  to  adorn  it  were  filled  with  a  new 
artistic  sense  \  they  discarded  the  old  Byzantine  types,  grand 
enough  in  their  day,  but  now  worn  out  and  rapidly  lapsing 
into  decrepitude,  after  eight  hundred  years'  service.  They 
conceived  a  new  and  purer  ideal,  and  thus  made  the  sepulchre 
of  Francis  the  cradle  of  a  renaissance  which  was  destined  to 
advance  to  the  highest  point  of  perfection.  Here  Guido  of 
Sienna  and  Giunta  of  Pisa  broke  loose  from  the  trammels  of 
the  old  Greek  masters,  softening  and  vivifying  their  hard 
immobility.  Then  came  Cimabue,  and  after  Cimabue, 
Giotto. 

"A  whole  cortige  of  artists  follow  after  Giotto,"  says  Ozanam,  "and  vie 
with  each  other  in  creating  masterpieces  to  commemorate  the  sanctity  of 
Francis  and  feed  the  piety  of  the  simple  population  of  the  mountains,  who 
daily  come  to  say  their  prayers  near  his  tomb," 

The  inspiration  which  evoked  this  new  school  of  painting 
and  architecture  sustained  its  first  flights. 

•'  If  I  have  dwelt  long  on  this  renaissance  of  the  arts,  it  is  because  I  discern  in 
it  the  heralds  of  a  great  literary  era.  When  I  see  a  people  carrying  marble  from 
the  quarry,  piling  it  up  in  colonnades,  in  ogives,  and  in  steeples,  covering  the 
walls  of  its  edifices  with  paintings  and  mosaics,  not  leavinga  single  corner  with- 
out its  emblem  or  device— when  I  see  this,  I  believe  that  a  thought  is  germinat- 
ing in  that  people,  revealing  itself  in  architectural  symbolism,  translating  itself 
more  clearly  in  the  outlines  of  drawing,  and  that  it  is  on  the  eve  of  finding  in 
language  a  more  exact  and  harmonious  expression.  In  the  train  of  these  great 
artists  who  have  passed  in  procession  before  us  we  shall  see  a  young  genera- 
tion of  poets  coming  down  from  the  hill  of  Assisi." 

Ozanam  passes  the  poets  in  review,  beginning  with  Frere 
Pacifique,  a  deserter  from  the  ranks  of  profane  literature, 
where  his  triumphs  had  been  crowned  by  the  emperor  himself, 
who  placed  on  his  head  the  ancient  Roman  laurel  crown  that 
was  to  encircle  the  brow  of  Dante  and  Petrarch. 

After  Brother  Peaceful  comes  a  poet  of  a  far  higher  order, 
St.   Bopavemure,  Avbom   Ger^on   styles  *' t^e  most   excellent 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  2 1 7 

master  who  ever  appearetl  in  the  University  of  Paris."  He 
wrote  that  exquisite  work  which,  Ozanam  says,  "  only  needs 
the  form  of  versification  to  be  called  a  poem" — T/ie  Le- 
gend of  St.  hrajicis.  The  ascetic  theologian  here  gives  full 
play  to  the  fountains  of  natural  tenderness  and  poetry  that  are 
in  his  heart.  In  his  description  of  the  death-scene  of  the 
saint,  there  is  one  of  those  touches  whose  delicate  grace  be- 
trays the  instinct  of  the  true  poet :  "  The  swallows,  those 
little  birds  that  love  the  light  and  hate  the  darkness,  although 
the  night  was  falling  just  as  the  holy  man  breathed  his  last 
sigh,  came  in  a  great  multitude  and  perched  upon  the  roof  of 
the  house,  and  remained  there  a  long  time,  whirling  about 
joyously,  as  if  to  render  a  signal  and  loving  testimony  to  the 
blessed  one  who  had  so  often  invited  them  to  sing  the  divine 
praises." 

Passing  on  to  Jacopone  da  Todi,  Ozanam  enters,  not  with- 
out some  hesitation,  as  he  admits,  on  the  history  of  this  extra- 
ordinary man,  who  passed  from  the  cloister  to  the  prison,  and 
from  the  prison  to  the  altar,  to  be  venerated  as  a  saint.  But 
painful  as  it  is  to  him  to  describe  a  period  when  we  see  the 
Church  on  fire,  and  a  great  religious  at  war  with  the  Pope,  it 
is  impossible,  in  a  notice  of  the  poets  of  the  age,  to  pass  by 
the  author  of  the  Stabat. 

Jacques  dei  Benedetti  was  in  the  flower  of  his  youth,  the 
son  of  one  of  the  richest  men  of  Todi,  an  old  cathedral  town, 
suspended  from  the  hill  that  overlooks  the  meeting  of  the 
Tiber  and  the  Naga  at  the  entrance  of  Umbria.  He  had 
squandered  his  father's  almost  boundless  wealth,  but  being 
now  a  doctor  of  law,  which  in  those  days  meant  a  person  of 
importance  and  power,  Jacques  determined  to  set  to  work 
and  repair  the  breach  he  had  made  in  the  paternal  coflfers. 
He  was  more  successful  than  scrupulous  in  the  pursuit  of  his 
object,  and  in  a  few  years  was  richer  than  ever.  To  crown 
his  prosperity  he  married  the  loveliest  maiden  in  his  native 
town,  who  brought  him,  in  addition  to  her  beauty,  a  splendid 
dower. 


2i8  Life  and  Works  of  Fredtric  Ozanam, 

It  fell  out  that  in  the  year  1268  Todi  was  celebrating  the 
public  games.  The  beautiful  young  wife  of  the  rich  juriscon- 
sult was  there,  seated  in  a  high  place  among  the  noblest 
women  of  the  town.  Suddenly  the  gallery  gave  way ;  the  cries 
of  the  unhappy  women  mingled  with  the  crash  of  the  faUing 
wood  and  the  music  of  lutes  and  viols.  Jacques  rushed  for- 
ward, and  seeing  his  wife  among  the  victims,  lifted  her  in  his 
arms  to  a  place  of  safety,  and  proceeded  quickly  to  relieve 
her  by  opening  her  bodice,  but  with  a  blush  she  signified  to 
him  to  wait  until  they  were  alone.  He  carried  her  to  a  dis- 
tance, and  there  opening  the  golden  tissue  of  her  festive  ap- 
parel, he  discovered  a  hair-shirt.  Before  he  could  express  his 
sorrow  and  surprise  she  expired  in  his  arms.  The  last  lesson 
of  his  beloved  one  was  not  lost  on  him.  He  guessed  too 
truly  whose  sins  and  follies  the  rude  instrument  of  penance 
was  intended  to  expiate.  What  was  there  in  her  spotless  life 
to  need  such  expiation?  Jacques  sold  all  his  goods  and  dis- 
tributed them  to  the  poor,  and  then,  like  one  distraught,  wan- 
dered in  and  out  of  the  churches  dressed  in  rags.  The  people 
nicknamed  him  Jacopone — mad  Jacques ! — and  pelted  him  as 
he  passed,  and  mocked  him.  But  Jacques  took  no  heed  of 
them.  Like  Jeremiah,  who  appeared  in  the  public  places  of 
Jerusalem  with  a  yoke  round  his  neck  to  typify  her  approaching 
captivity,  he  showed  himself  at  a  public  festival  half-naked, 
crawling  on  his  hands  and  teet,  with  saddle  and  bridle,  like  a 
beast  of  burden.  The  spectators  grew  pensive  at  the  sight, 
considering  to  what  a  miserable  estate  that  once  envied  destiny 
had  fallen. 

After  ten  years  of  this  strangely  heroic  life,  Jacopone  knocked 
at  the  door  of  the  Franciscan  monastery  and  asked  to  be  ad- 
mitted. The  monks  hesitated  long,  but  at  last  recognizing 
that  his  madness  was  akin  to  that  of  their  own  St.  Francis, 
they  took  him  in.  He  entreated  permission  to  retain  his  old 
nickname  as  the  one  most  suitable  to  him ;  he  refused  the 
honor  of  the  priesthood,  because  of  his  unworthiness,  and 
entered  as  a  lay  brother,  performing  the  most  laborious  and 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  219 

servile  offices  of  the  monastery.  At  last  he  obtained  such 
complete  mastery  over  his  senses  that  it  seemed  as  if  he  had 
now  reached  the  goal,  and  that  the  race  was  at  an  end.  It 
was  iiere,  on  the  contrary,  that  it  in  reality  began. 

When  Pierre  de  Morrone  was  dragged  from  his  Cenobite's 
cell  and  crowned  Pope  under  the  title  of  Celestine  V.,  Jaco- 
pone  addressed  him  an  epistle  in  verse,  in  which  he  reminded 
him  of  the  terrible  exchange  he  had  made  in  leaving  the  pious 
contemplations  of  his  cell  for  the  government  of  Christendom, 
and  bade  him  remember  that  if  he  failed  in  his  duty  the  curse 
of  Christendom  would  be  upon  him. 

*'I  felt  a  great  bitterness  of  pity  for  thee  in  my  heart,"  he  adds,  "  when  there 
came  forth  from  thy  mouth  that  word  /  zf///— that  word  which  placed  on  thy 
neck  a  yoke  heavy  enough  to  make  one  dread  thy  damnation.  Beware  of  in- 
cumbents. .  .  .  Beware  of  those  who  embezzle  the  public  money ;  if  thou 
canst  not  defend  thyself  against  them  thou  wilt  sing  a  sorry  song." 

The  Pope  was  so  terrified  by  the  picture  Jacopone  drew  of 
the  perils  of  the  Pontificate,  the  tempest  of  human  passions 
which  he  was  called  upon  to  control,  that,  overcome  by 
a  sense  of  his  own  weakness  and  the  magnitude  of  the  task, 
he  fled  back  to  his  desert  and  could  never  be  induced  to  re- 
turn. 

Benedict  Gaetani  was  elected  his  successor,  under  the  title 
of  Boniface  VIII.  Two  cardinals,  Giacomo  and  Pietro  Co- 
lonna,  protested  against  the  election,  and  drew  up  a  deed 
summoning  him  to  appear  at  the  bar  of  the  approaching  Uni- 
versal Council.  Jacopone  had  the  evil  fortune  to  figure  in 
this  deed  as  a  witness,  and  thus  was  included  in  the  excom- 
munication which  fell  upon  the  two  rebeUious  cardinals.  A 
period  of  struggle,  humiliation,  and  misery  now  began  for  the 
ardent  friar  of  Assisi,  and  only  closed  on  the  succession  of 
Benedict  XI.  to  the  Papal  throne,  when  the  interdict  was 
raised,  and  Jacopone,  set  free  from  his  dungeon,  went  to  end 
his  days  in  peaceful  captivity  with  his  brethren  at  Collazone. 
Here,  not  long  before  his  death,  he  composed  that  wonderful 
hymn  to  the   Mother  of  Sorrows,  the  Stabat  Maier^  which 


220  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

would  alone  have  made  his  name  immortal;  but  there  are 
many  other  fragments  from  the  pen  of  the  old  athlete  of  pen- 
ance which  betray  the  quaint  originaUty  of  his  mind,  as  well 
as  his  impetuous  love  of  God  and  tender  sympathy  for  his  fei- 
low-men. 

Jacopone,  who  was  greater  than  all  his  predecessors,  was 
to  usher  in  the  greatest  of  his  successors.  He  was  the  herald 
of  Dante.  The  Divina  Conmiedia  is  like  one  of  those  vast 
Roman  basilicas  which,  not  satisfied  with  admiring  it  within 
and  without,  we  are  curious  to  explore  to  its  very  foundations. 
"  You  descend  by  torchlight  to  the  sacred  vaults,"  says  Oza- 
nam,  *'  and  discover  the  entrance  of  a  catacomb  which  dives 
into  the  earth,  dividing  itself  into  many  branches  and  spread- 
ing over  an  immense  area.  If  you  go  through  it  to  the  end 
without  losing  your  way  or  turning  back,  you  come  out  at  last 
into  the  open  country,  a  great  way  off  from  the  place  where 
you  entered." 

All  the  lovers  and  commentators  of  Dante  have  indulged 
in  these  explorations  of  the  sources  and  antecedents  of  the 
Divina  Coinmedia,  none  more  diligently,  nor,  we  venture  to 
assert,  more  fruitfully,  than  Ozanam.  He  shows  us  the  Fran- 
ciscan poets,  more  especially  Jacopone,  as  opening  the  way 
to  Dante  by  pointing  out  to  him  all  that  poetry  might  borrow 
from  theology,  and  how  much  sweetness  and  beauty,  as  well 
as  lofty  wisdom,  it  might  draw  from  the  Divine  metaphysics 
of  the  faith — how  inseparable,  in  fact,  the  highest  kind  of 
beauty  is  from  the  highest  truth.  Jacopone  proved  also  that 
no  mysteries  of  faith  are  too  sublime,  no  speculations  of  phi- 
losophy too  subtle  or  too  profound,  to  be  adequately  expressed 
in  the  popular  idiom.  It  was  he  who,  more  than  any  of  his 
brother  poets,  drew  the  attention  of  the  world  to  the  honeyed 
tongue  of  his  native  land;  and  if  the  Divina  Commedia^ 
instead  of  being  written  in  the  classical  Latin  of  Virgil, 
was  confided  to  the  soft  bastard  Latin  of  the  Italian  people, 
the  world  owes  it  in  a  great  measure  to  the  mad  penitent  of 
Todi. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  221 

Perhaps  it  was  some  feeling  of  gratitude  for  this  unconscious 
lesson,  as  much  as  for  others  better  understood,  which  induced 
Dante  to  sing  the  praises  of  St.  Francis  in  such  jubilant  ac- 
cents, and  to  desire,  after  death,  to  be  buried  in  the  habit  of 
his  order,  and  at  the  foot  of  his  tomb;  or  was  the  Christian 
poet  prompted  rather  by  the  hope  that  he  might  find  the 
judgment  of  God  more  lenient  if  he  presented  himself  at  the 
mercy-seat  in  the  livery  of  the  poor,  and  that  "  the  thunder- 
bolt, which  would  not  spare  the  laurels  of  the  poet,  would 
respect  the  badge  of  poverty  "  ? 

It  is  said  that  the  great  Alighieri  was  personally  acquainted 
with  Jacopone,  and  that  when  sent  as  ambassador  to  Philip  le 
Bel  he  recited  to  the  king  some  of  the  Franciscan's  verses, 
where  the  latter  stigmatizes  the  policy  of  Boniface — a  bold- 
ness which  excited  such  fierce  resentment  against  the  daring 
satirist,  who  was  destined  to  expiate  it  in  years  of  captivity. 
"  Whether  this  be  true  or  not,  it  is  certain,"  remarks  Ozanam, 
"  that  when  Dante  stood  forth  to  address,  not  a  king,  but  that 
mighty  audience  which  centuries  have  gathered  to  him,  he 
found  the  minds  of  men  prepared  by  him  who  preceded  him 
as  a  theological  poet,  as  a  popular  poet,  and  as  a  satirist.  .  .  ." 

Ozanam  passes  on  from  the  poems  of  Jacopone  to  \\\&  Little 
Flowers  of  St.  Francis,  a  collection  of  legends  written  in  prose, 
but  breathing  in  every  page  the  music  of  true  poetry,  and 
fragrant  from  the  minds  of  St.  Francis  and  his  early  disciples. 
They  are  anonymous,  "  it  being  the  effort  of  mysticism  to  be 
forgotten  of  men  before  God,"  remarks  the  gleaner  who  pre- 
sents them  to  us ;  and  he  adds,  "  Here  I  pass  the  pen  to  a 
hand  more  delicate  than  mine."  Whilst  he  was  plunged  in 
the  arid  researches  of  the  archives,  this  hand  "more  delicate 
than  his  "  was  culling  the  fragrant  little  flowers  that  grew  in 
lowly  spots  along  their  road,  and  forming  them  into  a  bouquet 
whose  perfume  refreshed  him  in  many  an  hour  of  weariness 
and  pain.  Perhaps  the  fact  of  their  being  translated  by  her 
whom  he  styled  his  Beatrice  may  have  added  another  charm 
to  those  exquisite  idyls  in  Ozanam's  eyes,  and  account  in  a 


222  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

measure  for  the  fascination  which  they  possessed  for  him  to 
the  last.  Less  partial  critics  are,  however,  agreed  that  the 
Little  Flowers  are  rendered  in  French  with  a  freshness,  a 
ndivete\  and  a  dehcacy  of  touch  scarcely  surpassed  in  the 
original.  It  would  carry  us  beyond  our  limits  to  enter  on  an 
analysis  of  the  Fioretti,  but  we  hope  those  of  our  readers  who 
have  not  already  seen  this  gem-like  work  will  lose  no  time  in 
making  acquaintance  with  it;  with  the  legend  of  the  Wolf  of 
Gubbio,  that  beautiful  symbol  of  the  Church  purifying  and 
disarming  the  bloody  hand  of  the  feudal  power  which  weighed 
so  cruelly  on  the  people  of  the  middle  ages;  with  the  banquet 
of  St.  Clare  and  Francis,  and  other  scenes  of  their  mystic  and 
tender  intercourse;  with  the  docile  Httle  fishes  who  swam  up. 
to  the  sea  shore  and  listened,  glistening  on  the  silvery  wave, 
while  St.  Anthony  preached  to  them  the  mercies  and  the 
glories  of  God. 


CHAPTER  XXI. 

1848. 

In  the  autumn  of  1847  Ozanam  resumed  his  class  at  the 
Sorbonne  with  renewed  zest  and  health  almost  completely 
restored.  His  holiday  had  not  been  a  period  of  idleness,  and 
he  was  comparatively  satisfied  with  the  result  as  regarded 
the  work  done.  Writing  to  M.  Foisset  on  this  subject,  he 
says : 

"My  two  essays  on  Dan ie  a.nd  Les  Ger mains  are  for  me  like  the  two  ex- 
treme points  of  a  work  which  has  been  carried  on  partly  in  my  pubHc  lec- 
tures, and  which  I  should  be  glad  to  resume  in  order  to  complete  it.  It  would 
include  the  literary  history  of  the  barbarous  ages  ;  the  history  of  letters,  and 
consequently  of  civilization,  since  the  Latin  decline  and  the  first  commence- 
ments of  Christian  genius  until  the  close  of  the  thirteenth  century.  I  should 
make  it  the  subject  of  my  lectures  during  ten  years,  if  necessary,  and  if  God 
leaves  me  life.  These  lectures  would  be  taken  down  in  shorthand,  and  would 
compose  the  book  in  its  first  form,  which  I  should  publish  and  recast  at  the 
end  of  every  year.  This  method  of  proceeding  would  give  to  my  written  work 
some  of  that  glow  which  I  possess  sometimes  in  the  tribune,  but  which  for- 
sakes me  too  often  in  my  study.  It  would  also  have  the  advantage  of  hus- 
banding my  powers  by  not  dividing  them,  and  by  gathering  up  to  the  same 
end  the  little  that  I  know  and  the  little  that  I  can  do. 

*'  The  subject  is  admirable,  for  it  includes  the  exposition  of  that  long  and 
laborious  education  which  the  Church  gave  to  modern  peoples.  I  should 
open  with  a  volume  of  introduction,  in  which  I  should  endeavor  to  set  forth 
the  intellectual  state  of  the  world  at  the  advent  of  Christianity  ;  what  the 
Church  could  accept  out  of  the  inheritance  of  antiquity ;  how  much  she  did 
accept ;  consequently  the  origin  of  Christian  art  and  Christian  science  from 
the  days  of  the  catacombs  and  the  early  Fathers.  All  my  journeys  in  Italy 
last  year  tended  to  this  end. 

"After  this  would  come  the  picture  of  the  worid  of  the  barbarians,  pretty 
much  as  I  have  drawn  it  in  the  volume  which  awaits  your  criticism;*  then 

•  Lu  Germains. 

23} 


224  ^{f^  ^^^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

their  entry  into  the  society  of  Christendom,  and  the  prodigious  labors 
of  such  men  as  Boetius,  Isidore  of  Seville,  Bede,  Boniface,  and  others,  who 
did  not  allow  the  night  to  close  in,  but  carried  the  light  from  one  end  of  the 
invaded  empire  to  the  other,  making  it  penetrate  into  places  and  peoples  that 
had  remained  inaccessible,  and  passing  on  the  torch  from  hand  to  hand  until 
it  reached  Charlemagne.  I  shall  have  to  study  the  work  of  reparation  accom- 
plished by  this  great  man,  and  to  show  that  letters,  which  had  not  perished 
before  him,  did  not  die  out  afterwards. 

*'  I  would  then  show  all  the  great  things  that  were  done  in  England  in  the 
time  of  Alfred,  in  Germany  under  the  Othos,  and  this  would  lead  me  up  to 
Gregory  VII.  and  the  Crusades.  I  should  then  have  the  three  most  glorious 
centuries  of  the  Middle  Ages :  theologians  like  St.  Anselm,  St.  Bernard,  Pierre 
Lombard,  Albert  the  Great,  St.  Thomas,  St.  Bonaventure  ;  the  legislators  of 
the  Church  and  State,  Gregory  VII.,  Alexander  III.,  Innocent  III.,  and  Inno- 
cent IV.  ;  Frederic  II.,  St.  Louis,  Alphonsus  X. ;  the  entire  quarrel  between 
the  priesthood  and  the  empire  ;  the  communes,  the  Italian  republics,  the 
chroniclers  and  historians ;  the  universities  and  the  renaissance  of  law.  I 
should  have  all  that  chivalrous  poetry,  the  common  patrimony  of  Latin 
Europe,  and,  underlying  this,  all  the  epic  traditions  peculiar  to  each  people, 
and  which  are  the  germ  and  beginning  of  the  national  literature.  I  should 
assist  at  the  formation  of  modern  languages  ;  and  my  work  would  end  with 
the  Divine  Comedy,  the  grandest  monument  of  this  period,  its  abridgment,  as 
it  were,  and  its  glory. 

"  This  is  the  scheme  and  purpose  of  a  man  who  was  very  near  dying 
eighteen  months  ago,  whose  health  is  far  from  being  yet  fully  restored,  still 
compelling  him  to  all  sorts  of  precautions,  and  whom  you  know,  into  the  bar- 
gain, to  be  full  of  irresolution  and  weakness." 


But  this  elaborate  programme  was  about  to  be  arrested  by- 
events  composing  a  chapter  of  contemporary  history  in  which 
Ozanam  was  to  be  called  upon  to  play  his  part.  The  Revo- 
lution of  February  was  at  hand,  bringing  in  its  wake  lessons 
of  deep  import,  many-sided  and  salutary  warnings  to  such  as 
could  profit  by  them  in  the  midst  of  the  terrified  disarray  of 
the  explosion.  In  France  revolutions  are  like  death :  no  mat- 
ter how  long  they  are  watched  for,  when  they  come  they  are 
sudden  and  unexpected.  Ozanam's  attention  had  been  very 
little  directed  towards  poHtics ;  the  study  of  the  past  absorbed 
so  much  of  his  time  and  thoughts  that  it  left  him  small  leisure 
for  occupying  himself  with  the  present,  except  in  his  personal 
sphere  of  philanthropy  and  charity  \  but  his  mind  was  too 
philosophical,  his  mental  vision  too  clear,  too  penetrating,  not 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  225 

to  discern  the  premonitory  symptoms  which  were  manifesting 
themselves  around  him.  He  repeated  constantly  that  he  was 
no  politician,  that  he  was  not,  never  could  be, "  U7i  des  hommes 
de  la  situation'^'  and  in  a  sense  this  was  correct.  Neverthe- 
less, he  was  a  true  politician,  inasmuch  that  he  judged  politics 
like  a  Christian  philosopher  who  held  a  solid  grasp  of  the  great 
moral  principles  on  which  governments  and  politics  should  be 
conducted.  In  his  opinion  it  was  the  social,  not  the  political, 
question  which  should  engage — for  we  may  still  speak  in  the 
present  tense — the  chief  attention  and  utmost  efforts  of  poli- 
ticians in  France,  and  he  often  regretted  that  such  men  as  M. 
de  Montalembert,  for  instance,  devoted  themselves  so  much 
to  politics  instead  of  working  more  exclusively  at  the  solution 
of  the  social  problems  which  were,  and  still  are,  the  root  of  all 
revolutions  in  the  country.  His  policy  was  to  avert  them,  to 
prevent  them  by  charity,  by  the  extension  of  Catholic  ideas, 
by  the  drawing  together  of  the  classes,  by  breaking  down  the 
barriers  that  separate  them,  and  which  by  separation  breed 
mutual  mistrust,  ignorance,  envy,  and  resentment.  This  was 
what  he  had  in  view  from  the  beginning  of  the  foundation  of 
the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  He  meant  its  action  to 
go  far  deeper  than  the  alleviation,  the  moral  help  and  improve- 
ment, of  the  individual  poor. 

"A  struggle  is  preparing  between  the  classes,  and  it  threatens  to  be  terri- 
ble," he  says,  in  a  letter  already  quoted  ;  "  let  us  precipitate  ourselves  between 
these  hostile  ranks,  so  as  to  deaden  the  shock,  if  we  cannot  prevent  it." 

In  1836  he  wrote  to  his  friend  LaUier: 

"  The  question  which  agitates  the  world  to-day  is  not  a  question  oi  political 
forms,  but  a  social  o^w^sXAon  ;  if  it  be  the  struggle  osf  those  who  have  nothing 
with  those  who  have  too  much,  if  it  be  the  violent  shock  of  opulence  and 
poverty  which  is  making  the  ground  tremble  under  our  feet,  our  duty,  as 
Christians,  is  to  throw  ourselves  between  these  irreconcilable  enemies,  and  to 
induce  one  side  to  give  in  order  to  fulfil  the  law,  and  the  other  to  receive  as 
a  benefit ;  to  make  one  side  cease  to  exact,  and  the  other  to  refuse  ;  to  render 
equality  as  general  as  it  is  possible  amongst  men  ;  to  make  voluntan'  commu- 
nity of  possession  replace  taxation  and  forced  loans  ;  to  make  charity  accom- 
plish what  justice  and  law  alone  can  never  do," 


226  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

He  adhered  to  this  poUtical  creed  all  his  life.  Twelve 
years  later,  on  the  eve  of  the  "  violent  shock  "  which  his  far- 
seeing  sagacity  foretold,  he  repeats,  as  in  his  student  days: 
"  It  is  a  social  question ;  do  away  with  misery,  Christianize 
the  people,  and  you  will  make  an  end  of  revolutions." 

Soon  after  his  return  from  Italy  he  made  a  speech  at  the 
Cercle  Catholique,  in  which  he  described  what  he  had  wit- 
nessed in  the  Eternal  City,  the  attitude  of  the  Pope,  the  effect, 
so  far,  of  his  liberal  policy  on  the  Roman  population,  and  the 
hopes  and  fears  it  embodied  for  Rome  and  for  all  the  world. 
The  speech,  which  was  an  enthusiastic  eulogy  of  the  pacific 
revolution  which  the  Papal  policy  was  effecting,  ended  with 
the  words,  "  Passons  aux  barbares  /  Suivons  Pie  IX.  /"  The 
Press  caught  up  the  expression  with  a  hue  and  cry  against 
Ozanam,  and  a  hot  controversy  ensued  between  his  party  and 
the  newspapers.  He  took  no  part  in  it,  but  contented  him- 
self with  explaining  privately  to  a  few  friends  the  real  mean- 
ing of  the  contested  sentence,  which  was  that  he  considered  Pius 
IX.  was  now  accomplishing  what  the  liberal  party  all  over  the 
world  had  been  working  and  waiting  for  for  nearly  a  quarter 
of  a  century,  and  that  it  behoved  Catholics  to  join  in  the 
movement,  and  follow  the  Pope,  passing  over  with  him  to  the 
barbarians,  that  is  to  say,  "  leaving  the  narrow  camp  of 
monarchs  and  statesmen  and  going  forward  to  the  people,  in 
order  to  draw  them  into  the  Church."  The  camp  of  the 
monarchs  was  perhaps  too  completely  identified  in  Ozanam's 
mind  with  the  Grand  Mo7iarque^  who  may  be  looked  upon  as 
the  last  of  the  monarchs  of  France — the  one  in  whose  person 
their  prestige  culminated  to  its'  apogee,  who  treated  the  people 
as  his  property,  and  reduced  society  to  a  community  of  valets. 
Louis  Quatorze,  after  deifying  monarchy  through  half  a  cen- 
tury, gave  the  signal  for  its  downfall  and  struck  the  funeral 
knell  of  the  national  freedom  which  was  to  find  its  grave  under 
the  ruins  of  the  throne,  plunging  the  nation  headlong  from  the 
absolutism  of  kings  to  the  absolutism  of  democrats,  replacing 
the  throne  by  the  guillotine. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  227 

There  may  be  some  exaggeration  in  the  extreme  severity 
of  historians  of  Ozanam's  school  in  their  judgment  of  the 
Grand Monarque's  policy  diiiLX  character;  there  can  be  none 
in  their  opinion  of  its  consequences,  in  their  scorn  for  the 
slavish  degradation  of  the  human  mind  which  the  demi-god 
exacted  from  all  around  him,  and  to  which  may  be  traced  one 
of  the  remote  but  certain  causes  of  the  subsequent  national  de- 
cline, the  corruption  of  society,  the  absorption  of  manly  in- 
dependence, patriotism,  and  energy  in  France.  He  it  is  who 
is  mainly  responsible  for  the  contempt  of  the  great  for  the 
people,  the  cruel  oppression  of  the  poor  by  the  ruHng  classes, 
and  all  that  series  of  corrupt  grievances  which  ended  in  the 
mad  license  of  1793,  driving  back  the  nation,  as  by  a  law  of 
nature  in  France,  under  the  yoke  of  despotism,  until  it  again 
broke  out  in  anarchy,  and  again  fell  back  under  the  rule  of 
armed  force. 

Ozanam,  who  persistently  viewed  the  present  in  the  light 
of  the  past,  saw  no  remedy  for  this  delirious  see-saw  game 
between  despotism  and  communism  but  to  Christianize  the 
people,  so  that  they  should  be  capable  of  governing  them- 
selves, and  thus  pass  efifectually  and  lor  ever  from  under  the 
unstable  rule  of  kings. 

The  people  had  invaded  the  monarchy  as  the  barbarians  of 
old  invaded  the  empire,  making  much  havoc  and  desolation, 
laying  waste  fields  and  cities  in  their  progress;  but  now  the 
time  had  come  for  them  to  prove  themselves  the  saviours  of 
the  society  they  had  overturned,  and  to  build  the  peace  of  the 
world  upon  their  conquest.  It  was  necessary,  in  order  to 
hasten  this  event,  that  those  who  governed  the  people  should 
espouse  their  interests  and  their  cause. 

"When  I  say  Passons  aux  barbares,''  explains  Ozanam,  "I  mean  that  we 
Hiould  do  as  he  (Pius  IX.)  hrs  done  ;  that  we  should  occupy  ourselves  with 
the  people,  whose  wants  are  too  many  and  whose  rights  are  too  few  ;  who  are 
crying  out,  and  fairly,  for  a  share  in  public  affairs,  for  guarantees  for  work, 
and  against  distress  ;  who  follow  bad  leaders,  because  they  have  no  good 
ones,  and  whom  we  have  no  right  to  hold  responsible  for  the  History  of  the 
Girondins^  which  they  don't  read,  nor  fur  the  banquets,  where  they  don't  feast. 


228  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

We  may  not  succeed  in  converting  Attila  and  Genseric,  but,  with  God's  help, 
we  may  make  something  of  the  Huns  and  the  Vandals. 

"  Read  the  opening  of  the  City  of  Goa,  Salvian,  Gildas,  and  you  will  find 
that  even  in  the  fifth  century  many  saints  had  more  sympathy  with  the  Goths, 
the  Vandals,  the  Arian  and  idolatrous  Franks,  than  with  the  degenerate 
Cathodes  of  the  Roman  cities.  Honestly,  did  it  not  require  some  indulgence 
not  to  despair  of  the  salvation  of  Clovis  ?  .  .  .  Don't  believe  those  who  find 
it  easier  to  condemn  a  party,  a  people  en  niasse^  than  to  study  the  differences 
that  divide  them.  ...  It  grieves  me,  too,  to  hear  people  repeating  the  com- 
parison between  Pius  IX.  and  Louis  XVI.,  which  is  the  pet  thesis  of  the  retro- 
grade party,  of  the  French  and  Austrian  embassies  in  Rome,  the  thesis  of  all 
those  who  love  neither  the  Pope  nor  liberty.  How  can  he  be  compared  even 
to  St.  Celestin  ?  Have  we  seen  him  bending  under  the  burden  ?  He  is 
taunted  with  having  had  two  secretaries  killed  under  him  !  Do  we  not  all 
know  that  the  chief  difficulty  of  a  new  era  is  to  find  new  men  ;  that  the  most 
terrible  part  of  Pius  IX. 's  task  is  the  political  education  of  his  ministers  and 
his  people  ?  He  has  not  inherited  from  Sixtus  V. ;  I  know  this  quite  well, 
and  I  rejoice  at  it.  We  must  remount  perhaps  to  Alexander  III.  to  find  a 
soul  of  the  same  metal  as  his." 

But  turning  quickly  from  these  incidental  remarks  on  poli- 
tics, Ozanam  replunges,  with  a  sense  of  pleasure  and  fitness, 
into  the  calm  studies  of  the  past. 

"  Don't  fear  that  I  shall  take  to  politics,"  he  says  to  M.  Foisset.  "  I  find 
the  time  long  until  my  strength  shall  enable  me  to  take  up  the  plan  I  have 
confided  to  you.  I  shall  bless  God  if  He  allows  me  to  bury  my  life  in  these 
dear  studies,  I  must  bless  all  the  same  if  He  condemns  me  to  go  on  working 
as  at  present,  only  at  intervals,  and  with  wearisome  precautions." 

These  lines  were  written  on  the  2 2d  of  February.  On  the 
24th  the  Revolution  broke  out. 

The  general  excitement,  the  upbreaking  of  terribly  destruc- 
tive forces  through  the  calm  surface,  the  uproar  and  universal 
confusion  of  these  periodically  recurring  crises,  are  apt  to  dis- 
turb the  presence  of  mind  of  the  calmest.  The  most  phleg- 
matic politicians  fly  before  the  storm  ;  reformers  lose  faith  in 
their  life-long  cherished  theories,  and  let  them  go.  Ozanam 
did  not  lose  faith  in  his.  When  the  tempest  was  let  loose  he 
clung  to  them  more  firmly  than  ever,  trying  to  make  his  voice 
heard  above  the  storm,  that  he  might  save  the  vessel  and  pre- 
vent her  from  riding  to  utter  and  irreparable  destruction.  He 
at  once  put  on  the  uniform  of  a  national  guard  and  took  his 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  229 

turn  of  duty  at  the  post  of  peril  with  all  good  citizens.  But 
this  was  not  his  proper  place.  He  knew  it,  and  repeated  it 
to  those  who,  considering  only  his  gifts  and  personal  influence, 
built  hopes  on  him  as  a  political  leader  in  the  new  order  of 
things. 

♦'You  are  wrong,  my  dear  friend,"  he  answers  to  M.  Foisset's  urgent  en- 
treaties in  this  direction  ;  "  you  are  mistaken  in  fancying  that  I  am  one  of  the 
men  for  this  emergency.  I  am  less  up  than  any  one  in  the  questions  that  are 
about  to  occupy  the  public  mind.  I  mean  the  questions  of  labor,  wages,  in- 
dustry, economy,  more  important  than  all  the  controversies  of  the  politicians. 
The  history  even  of  modem  revolutions  is  almost  unknown  to  me.  I  shut 
myself  up  in  the  Middle  Ages,  which  I  studied  with  a  kind  of  passion,  and  1 
believe  it  is  there  I  found  whatever  little  light  is  left  me  in  the  darkness  of  the 
present  circumstances.  I  am  not  a  man  of  action  ;  I  was  bom  neither  lor  the 
tribune  nor  the  public  squares.  If  I  can  do  anything,  however  little,  it  is  in 
my  chair  ;  or  perhaps  in  the  quiet  of  a  library,  where  I  may  extract  from 
Christian  philosophy,  trom  the  history  of  Christian  times,  a  series  of  ideas 
which  I  unfold  to  young  men,  to  troubled  and  uncertain  minds,  in  order  to 
reassure,  to  reanimate,  to  rally  them  m  the  midst  of  the  confusion  ol  the 
present  and  the  terrible  uncertainties  of  the  future. 

♦*  I  may  be  mistaken,  but  it  seems  to  me  that  the  design  of  God  is  unfolding 
itself  to  us  more  rapidly  than  we  thought;  tnat  the  events  of  Vienna  are  the 
final  explanation  of  those  of  Paris  and  Rome ;  and  that  we  already  hear  a 
voice  crying  :  '  Ecce  facio  coelos  novos  et  terram  novam  ! '  Since  the  fall  of 
the  Roman  empire  the  world  has  seen  no  such  revolution  as  this.  I  believe 
still  in  the  invasion  of  the  barbarians,  but  up  to  the  present  I  see  more  Franks 
and  Goths  than  Huns  and  Vandals.  I  believe,  in  fact,  in  the  emancipation 
of  oppressed  nationalities,  and  I  admire  more  than  ever  the  mission  of  Pius 
IX  ,  raised  up  so  opportunely  for  Italy  and  for  tne  world.  In  a  word,  I  don't 
disguise  from  myself  either  the  perils  of  the  times  or  the  hardness  of  hearts. 
I  expect  to  see  a  great  amount  of  distress,  of  disorder  and  perhaps  pillage,  and 
a  long  eclipse  oi  literature,  to  which  I  had  devoted  my  life.  I  believe  that  we 
may  b^  ground  to  powder,  but  that  it  will  be  under  the  triumphal  car  of  Chris- 
tianity." 

He  philosophized  thus  calmly  on  events  and  their  final  is- 
sue on  the  15th  of  March — that  is  to  say,  when  the  Revolu- 
tion was  in  full  swing,  three  weeks  after  its  outbreak. 

His  name  had  been  immediately  proposed  on  several  lists 
as  candidate  for  the  forthcoming  elections,  but  Ozanam  de- 
clined the  honor.  A  share,  even  passive,  in  the  government 
was  a  solemn  responsibility  for  which  he  did  not  believe  him- 
self qualified.     He  might  have  allowed  himself  to  be  overruled 


230  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

as  regarded  his  personal  disability,  but  being  better  acquaint- 
ed than  most  with  the  forces  which  the  CathoUcs  had  at  their 
disposal,  he  remained  convinced  that  they  were  not  strong 
enough  to  stand  and  conquer  alone. 

"  The  best  thing  for  us  to  do  is  to  give  our  votes  to  the  Republican  candi- 
dates who  share  our  faith,  and  who  offer  serious  guarantees  for  our  liberty," 
he  says  ;  but  at  the  close  of  the  same  letter  he  adds:  "Just  as  I  had  finished 
this  there  comes  a  letter  from  Lyons  full  of  urgent  entreaties  to  let  my  name 
appear  amongst  the  candidates.  They  assure  me  that  the  division  of  parties 
and  votes  is  so  great  that  I  run  a  very  good  chance  of  securing  a  majority.  On 
the  otlier  hand,  I  have  not  very  robust  health  to  think  of  braving  the  storms 
of  the  Assemblee  Nationale,  and,  moreover,  my  habit  of  public  speaking  is 
not  at  all  of  that  kind  which  I  should  require  in  the  Chamber.  My  friends 
here  are  divided.  Some  advise  me  to  wait  until  the  following  Assembly. 
What  do  you  think  ?  I  will  wait  till  Saturday  before  writing  to  Lyons,  so 
that  your  letter  may  reach  roe  in  time.    Write  by  return  of  post." 

We  can  only  conjecture  what  M.  Foisset's  answer  was  from 
the  result.  Ozanam  declined  this  offer,  as  he  had  done  all 
previous  ones.  He  did  not,  however,  consider  himself  eman- 
cipated from  that  indirect  share  in  the  legislation  of  the 
country  which  is  the  inalienable  duty  of  every  intelligent  and 
patriotic  citizen.  He  refrained  from  taking  part  in  the  war  that 
was  being  carried  on  in  the  Chamber,  but  he  entered  the  lists 
of  another  arena,  where  the  voice  of  those  who  defend  truth 
and  all  noble  causes  finds  a  powerful  and  far-reaching  echo. 

*'  My  share  in  public  life,  from  which  no  man  should  shrink  to-day,  is  con- 
fined to  the  little  1  shall  do  in  the  Ere  Nouvelle^  which  it  is  decided  will  appear 
on  the  15th  of  April.  If  you  come  here  (to  Paris),  as  I  hope,  within  a  few 
weeks,  you  will  soon  understand  why  the  Univers  could  not  remain  the  sole 
organ  of  the  Catholics.  We  must  found  a  new  work  for  these  new  times,  one 
which  will  not  provoke  the  same  angry  feelings  and  the  same  mistrust.  More- 
over, as  there  are  various  opinions  amongst  Catholics,  it  is  better  that  they 
should  be  faithfully  represented  by  various  journals,  and  that,  because  of  their 
very  diversity,  the  Church  of  France  should  cease  to  be  responsible  for  what 
passes  through  the  brain  of  a  journalist." 

This  may  be  the  place  to  say  a  few  words  about  the  part 
Ozanam  himself  played  as  a  journalist. 


CHAPTER  XXII. 
1848-49. 

His  first  experience  in  journalism  dates,  as  we  have  related, 
from  the  year  1832,  when  in  his  student  days  he  wrote  for 
the  Tributie  Catholique^  and  applied  the  proceeds  to  the  week- 
ly quete  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul. 

Simultaneously  with  that  brave  little  paper  M.  Bailly 
started  a  monthly  magazine,  called  the  Revue  Europeenne^ 
which,  like  the  Tribune^  was  kept  going  entirely  by  his  own 
energy  and  the  talent  of  his  juvenile  staff  of  contributors. 
Both  publications  did  their  work  in  their  day,  but  it  was  re- 
stricted in  many  ways  :  funds  were  wanting,  in  the  first  place; 
in  the.  next  place,  the  apathy  of  the  Catholics  was  in  those 
days,  as  it  still  is,  disastrous  to  every  enterprise  of  the  kind ; 
the  help  that  might  have  been  easily  given  by  a  great  num- 
ber was  withheld,  from  indifference,  from  want  of  apprehend- 
ing the  importance  of  the  Press  as  a  power  within  reach  of 
their  party.  Then,  again,  the  recent  catastrophe  of  the  Ave- 
nir  was  fresh  in  men's  minds,  and  went  far  to  paralyze  what- 
ever vitality  and  spirit  of  enterprise  yet  lingered  amongst  the 
Catholics.  The  Avenir  had  opened  the  lists  of  Catholic  con- 
troversy, and  for  a  moment  fixed  the  attention  of  France,  we 
might  say  of  Christendom,  on  the  interests  of  the  cause ;  but 
the  meteor  which  flashed  so  suddenly  into  fame  had  died  out, 
leaving  only  a  dark  track  upon  the  waters  which  its  fiery  bril- 
liance had  for  a  moment  lighted  up  so  vividly.  M.  de  La- 
mennais'  genius  had  planted  the  Catholic  flag  on  a  pedestal, 
and,  together  with  the  eloquence  of  Lacordaire  and  Montalem- 
bert,  compelled  the  attention  of  the  country  to  its  claims.  Men 

a3» 


232  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

looked  on  as  at  a  magnificent  display  of  arms  in  a  knightly 
tournament;  they  were  dazzled  and  delighted,  even  when 
their  sympathies  were  not  with  the  combatants.  But  that 
was  over  now.  The  knights  had  carried  their  prowess  too 
far,  and  were  bidden  to  lay  down  their  arms.  A  reaction  of 
shyness  and  mertia  had  ensued ;  no  one  cared  to  reopen  the 
lists  which  had  been  closed  in  such  signal  humihation.  M. 
de  Lamennais,  moreover,  had  towards  the  end  infringed  the 
laws  of  Catholic  chivalry  by  the  use  of  forbidden  weapons. 
Hitherto  reHgious  controversy  had,  in  all  ages,  been  carried 
on  with  a  strict  regard  to  the  claims  of  charity  ;  even  Bossuet, 
wielding  his  giant  sword  against  the  "  reformers,"  never  for- 
got this,  but  preserved  in  the  heat  of  the  fight  that  courtesy 
of  form  which  is  the  safeguard  of  dignity  and  mutual  respect. 
M.  de  Lamennais  adhered  to  this  precedent  up  to  a  certain 
point,  up  to  the  period  of  the  reaction  which  followed  on  the 
second  issue  of  his  Essai  sur  V J?idifference  j  then  wounded 
pride  embittered  his  mind  and  warped  his  judgment ;  he  was 
stung  to  fury  by  the  just  disapproval  of  the  Catholics,  and  in 
his  fierce  self-defence  began  first  to  dip  his  pen  into  the  vit- 
riol with  which  he  was  soon  to  bespatter  the  Church  he  be- 
trayed. Lamennais  was  the  first  to  inaugurate  in  Catholic 
controversy  that  envenomed,  violent,  and  aggressive  style 
which  has  since  become  an  institution  in  France,  and  done 
so  much  harm  to  charity,  even  when  accompanied  by  well- 
meaning  zeal  and  undeniable  talent. 

The  Avenir  fell,  and  the  country  was  still  reeling  under 
the  shock  of  the  tremendous  incident  when  Ozanam  drew 
his  maiden  sword  as  a  journalist  in  the  modest  little  field  of 
the  Tribune  Catholique.  But  he  could  not  remain  satisfied 
with  the  scope  he  found  here.  Inexperienced  as  he  was,  he 
understood  the  immense  importance  for  the  Catholics  of  hav- 
ing an  able  organ  of  their  own ;  he  was  continually  deplor- 
ing their  mistaken  policy  in  keeping  their  religion  out  of  sight, 
as  if  it  were  strictly  a  private  concern,  whereas  by  making 
common  cause  in  public  they  could  create  a  party  powerful 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  233 

enough  to  be  a  weight  in  the  State,  and  thus  force  the  Gov- 
ernment to  reckon  with  them. 

From  1832  to  1833  the  Tribune  Catholique^  on  every 
available  occasion,  put  forward  this  idea  of  the  necessity  of 
constituting  the  Catholics  into  a  public  body.  They,  how- 
ever, listened  with  indifference,  and  gave  no  practical  re- 
sponse. The  urgent  need  of  a  daily  Catholic  paper  was  also 
brought  before  them,  but  with  the  same  result.  The  latter 
design  was  nevertheless  on  its  way  to  fulfilment  from  an  un- 
expected quarter. 

In  the  autumn  of  1833  a  priest  named  the  Abb^  Migne 
came  to  Paris  with  the  idea  of  founding  a  Catholic  journal. 
He  had  neither  funds  nor  talent,  but  these  slight  disabilities 
did  not  daunt  him.  He  was  one  of  those  men  who  have 
an  indomitable  faith  in  the  success  of  his  own  ideas,  and  an 
energy  which  supplements  all  other  wants.  A  friend  of  his, 
M.  de  la  Tuilerie,  who  had  accompanied  him  to  Pans,  in- 
herited just  at  this  moment  a  sum  of  ;£^i,4oo  from  a  devout 
relative,  and  it  occurred  to  him  that  he  could  make  no  more 
appropriate  use  of  the  legacy  than  to  devote  it  to  found  a 
daily  Catholic  paper  under  the  Abb6  Migne's  management. 
He  accordingly  handed  over  the  money  for  this  purpose. 
The  Abbe  went  to  M.  Bailly  and  consulted  him  as  to  how  he 
should  set  to  work.  M.  Bailly  at  once  proposed  that  he 
should  take  the  Tribune  Cathohque^  and  enlarge  and  improve 
it,  instead  of  creating  an  entirely  new  journal.  "  Prenez  mon 
ours,"  he  said,  pointing  his  argument  with  a  familiar  saying, 
**  take  the  Tribune  Caiholique^  with  its  little  knot  of  five  hun- 
dred subscribers,  and  its  zealous  contributors,  and  let  it  ap- 
pear daily  and  under  a  new  name.  This  will  be  better  than 
breaking  new  ground,  building  on  nothing,  and  dividing  the 
forces."  The  Abb6  Migne  closed  with  the  offer,  and  the 
Tribune  Catholique  disappeared  one  day  to  come  forth  the 
next  under  the  title  of  the  Univers. 

M.  Bailly  had  undertaken  to  find  writers,  and  he  kept  his 
word.     The  Abb6  Gerbet  had  retired  into  complete  obscurity 


234  -^i/^  ^^^(i  ll'orks  of  Frederic  Ozafiam. 

since  the  suppression  of  the  Avenir.  He  was  living  as  he 
could,  picking  up  a  few  francs  here  and  there  by  teaching, 
very  rarely  by  writing,  and  then  anonymously.  He  was  now 
in  Paris  casting  about  for  work  that  would  bring  him  a  crust 
of  bread.  M.  Bailly  proposed  to  him  to  write  a  series  of 
articles  for  the  Univers^  which  the  Abbe  Migne  should  sign, 
it  being  necessary  to  conceal  the  real  writer's  name,  lest  it 
should  give  a  color  to  the  new  journal  which  it  did  not  mean 
to  adopt.  M.  Gerbet  assented  joyfully,  and  on  the  ist  of 
November,  1833,  the  first  number  of  the  Univers  appeared 
with  a  leader  on  La  Toussaint^  whose  lyrical  beauty  took  all 
Paris  by  storm.  It  was  signed  Migne,  fondateur^  administra- 
tetir,  directeiit,  and  at  once  made  a  name  for  *'  this  provincial 
Abbe  who  wrote  like  Fenelon,"  and  attracted  general  curiosi- 
ty to  his  paper.  M.  Gerbet  continued  for  some  time  to  write 
under  the  pompous  editorial  signature,  and  sustained  the 
popularity  which  the  first  sensation  had  produced. 

Ozanam,  meantime,  contributed  his  able  and  attractive 
articles  with  unflagging  zeal,  and  a  talent  that  was  rapidly 
maturing  by  practice.  Philosophy  and  history  were  his 
special  subjects,  and  he  made  them  the  medium  of  that  sus- 
tained defence  of  Catholic  doctrine  and  calm  logical  contro- 
versy on  Catholic  principles  and  opinions  which  was  so  much 
needed,  and  which  up  to  this  time  was  unknown  in  French 
journalism.  A  contemporary  and  fellow- worker  of  Ozanam 's, 
who  stands  high  amongst  French  men  of  letters  of  the  present 
day,  observed  to  the  writer,  speaking  of  the  state  of  the  press 
at  this  period,  '^  Ozanam  was  the  Providence  of  the  Catholic 
press  in  France  from  1833  to  1840;  without  his  talent,  and 
M.  Bailly's  energy,  it  would  have  utterly  disappeared." 

Ozanam  all  his  life  set  immense  store  by  the  power  of  the 
press  as  an  engine  in  the  Catholic  service,  above  all  in  his 
own  country,  where  the  nervous,  impressionable  nature  of  the 
people  renders  them  so  peculiarly  sensitive  to  its  action. 

When  the  Revolution  of  February  broke  out,  he  saw  no 
more  efficacious  barrier  against  the  invading  flood  of  revolu- 


Life  arid  Works  of  Ftederk  Ozanam,  235 

tionary  socialism  than  the  influence  of  an  enlightened  press ; 
and  this  belief  induced  him  to  start,  with  the  co-operation  of 
the  P^re  Lacordaire,  a  new  paper  called  the  Ere  Nouvelle,  a     ^ 
democTatic   Catholic  organ,  whose  mission  it  was  to  reconcile 
Catholics  with  the  Republic. 

The  P^re  Lacordaire  and  he  diverged  widely  in  their  poli- 
tical sentiments  :  Ozanam  hailed  the  Republic  as  the  pro- 
bable and  only  possible  salvation  of  the  country ;  Lacordaire, 
like  the  great  bulk  of  the  Catholics,  accepted  it  as  a  plank  in 
the  siiip wreck  of  constitutional  monarchy.  What  else  was 
there  to  turn  to  ?  The  elder  branch  of  the  Bourbons  was 
not  forthcoming,  and  the  younger  had  snapped  in  their  fingers 
like  a  rotten  reed.  Lacordaire,  who  passed,  and  still  passes 
with  many,  for  being  an  enthusiastic  democrat,  w^as  not  even 
a  convinced  republjcaa—  He  declared  publicly  at  the  Union 
"Ciub,  on  the  23d  of  February,  the  very  eve  of  the  Revolu- 
tion, that  he  "had  not  an  iota  of  republicanism  in  him." 
And  not  long  after  this  he  says  again,  "  I  did  not  agree  with 
Ozanam's  views.  I  did  not  wish  to  treat  the  question  of 
democracy  theoretically,  but  confined  myself  to  accepting  the 
fait  accompli,  and  drawing  from  it  as  much  advantage  as 
possible  for  religion  and  society.  ...  I  accepted  the  re- 
public, which  gave  us  the  freedom  of  the  schools  and  the 
freedom  of  rehgious  bodies."  * 

The  latter  was  indeed  complete  to  a  triumph,  and  calculat- 
ed to  plead  loudly  in  favor  of  the  new  Government  with  the 
founder  of  the  Dominican  order  in  France.  When,  on  the 
4th  of  May,  the  National  Assembly  appeared  on  the  peristyle 
of  tiie  Palais  Bourbon  to  proclaim  the  Republic,  the  tonsur- 
ed monk  who  stood  in  the  midst  of  them,  conspicuous  by  his 
whiFe  cowl,  was  cheered  enthusiastically  as  he  descended  the 
step's,  and  conducted  by  the  populace,  in  a  sort  of  triumphal 
march,  to  the  gates  of  the  Corps  L6gislatif. 

This  election  was  a  source  of  immense  satisfaction  to 
Ozanam,  who  had  been  active  in  preparing  it  by  his  writings 

•Vide  Montalembert,  CEuvres  CompiiUs,  vol.  ix.  p.  520,  "Lc  Pcre  LacordaTc." 


236  Life  atid  Works  of  Frederic  Ozafiam. 

and  his  personal  influence  with  the  democratic  Catholics. 
The  event,  however,  when  it  did  occur,  was  the  spontaneous 
act  of  the  Marseillais,  without  any  intervention  whatever,  and 
caused  great  surprise  to  the  Pere  Lacordaire  himself,  who 
was  not  even  aware  that  his  name  had  been  proposed  as 
candidate  there. 

Ozanam,  meantime,  carried  on  the  good  fight  with  his  pen 
both  in  public  and  private.  The  Christianizing  of  the  people 
was  now,  as  ever,  his  chief  pre-occupation. 

"  If  a  greater  number  of  Christians,  and  above  all  of  priests,  had  but  occu- 
pied themselves  with  the  working  class  these  last  ten  years,  we  should  be  more 
secure  of  the  future,  and  all  our  hopes  rest  on  the  little  that  has  been  done  in 
this  direction  up  to  the  present,"  he  writes  to  his  brother  the  Abbe  ;  *'  I  quite 
enter  into  your  idea  about  the  observance  of  Sunday.  I  will  draw  up  a  short 
notice  on  the  subject  myself,  and  have  it  distributed  and  pasted  up,  and  per- 
haps we  may  by  this  means  stir  up  the  workingmen  to  send  in  a  petition  about 
it  themselves. 

"  On  the  other  hand,  I  am  going  to  have  a  meeting  of  Professors  at  my  own 
house  this  afternoon,  where  we  shall  discuss  the  feasibility  of  founding  public 
classes  and  a  sort  of  night-school  for  these  good  fellows.  The  Carmelite 
priests  will  give  us  what  help  they  can,  and  Monseigneur  *  gives  us  the  pre- 
mises. 

"  Keep  me  informed  of  what  is  being  done  in  this  line  at  Lille,  and  also  what 
deputies  the  Catholics  of  the  Nord  are  anxious  to  get  into  the  Assembly. 

"  The  first  duty  of  Christians  now  is  not  to  be  frightened,  and  the  second  is 
not  to  frighten  others,  but,  on  the  contrary,  to  reassure  the  timorous,  and  to 
make  them  understand  that  the  present  crisis  is  like  a  storm  that  cannot  last. 
Providence  is  still  here,  and  we  never  see  it  allow  these  financial  shocks,  which 
shake  the  material  order  of  societies,  to  last  more  than  a  few  months.  Let  us 
not  then  be  over-anxious  about  the  morrow,  saying.  What  shall  we  eat,  and 
how  shall  we  clothe  ourselves  ?  '  Let  us  only  have  courage,  and  seek  first  the 
justice  of  God  and  the  welfare  of  the  country,  and  everything  else  will  be  given 
to  us  over  and  above." 

It  required  a  courage  as  firmly  rooted  in  supernatural  trust 
as  Ozanam's  to  remain  serene  and  undisturbed,  meantime, 
until  the  shock  had  passed  away.  A  rising  at  Lille  caused 
him  some  alarm  for  the  safety  of  his  brother;  but  this  personal 
anxiety  did  not  disturb  his  judgment  of  events  or  cast  his 
patriotic  pre-occupations  into  the  shade.     "  If  the  workmen 

♦AiTrc. 


Life  atid  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanatn.  237 

of  Lille  would  but  imitate  the  moderation  and  wisdom  of  their 
brothers  of  Paris  and  Lyons !  "  he  exclaims. 

"  Here  we  are  in  this  great  and  opulent  metropolis  for  the  last  seven  weeks 
without  a  government  or  a  regular  police  force,  and  yet  we  hear  of  no  more 
murders,  robberies,  or  other  misdemeanors  than  before.  Don't  believe  those 
evil-minded  persons  who  go  about  spreading  absurd  stories ;  there  is  not  a 
word  of  truth  in  them,  and  nothing  is  more  contrary  to  the  dispositions  of  the 
population  of  Paris,  who  on  every  occasion  seek  to  show  respect  to  religion 
and  sympathy  to  the  clergy.  My  friend,  the  Abbe  Cherruel,  who  has  blessed 
thirteen  trees  of  liberty,  has  been  quite  affected  by  the  proofs  of  faith  which  he 
found  amidst  this  people,  where,  since  1815,  the  priest  has  been  taught  to  see 
only  enemies  of  God  and  of  the  Church. 

"  Occupy  yourself  as  much  with  servants  as  with  masters,  with  workmen  as 
much  as  with  employers.  This  is  henceforth  the  only  means  of  salvation  for 
the  Church  of  France,  The  cures  must  set  aside  their  pious  parish  congrega- 
tions, little  flocks  of  good  sheep  in  the  midst  of  an  enormous  population  to  whom 
the  parish  priest  is  a  stranger.  He  must  henceforth  occupy  himself,  not  only 
with  the  indigent,  but  with  that  immense  class  of  poor  who  do  not  ask  for  alms, 
but  who  are,  nevertheless,  attracted  by  special  preaching,  by  charitable  asso- 
ciations, by  the  affection  that  is  shown  to  them,  and  which  touches  them  more 
than  we  think.  Now,  more  than  ever,  we  ought  to  meditate  on  a  beautiful 
passage  in  the  second  chapter  of  the  Epistle  of  St.  James,  which  seems  as  if  it 
had  been  written  expressly  for  these  times." 

Ozanam  addressed  the  same  exhortations,  with  the  same 
unflinching  boldness,  to  the  clergy  generally  that  he  used 
towards  his  brother.  The  En  Nouvelle  had  gained  the  popu- 
lar ear,  and  was  to  him  the  medium  of  the  propagation  of 
Christian  democratic  principles. 

"  Priests  of  France,  do  not  be  offended  at  the  freedom  of  speech  which  a  lay- 
man uses  in  appealing  to  your  zeal  as  citizens!"  he  exclaims.  "Mistrust 
yourselves,  mistrust  the  habits  and  customs  of  a  more  peaceful  period,  and 
have  less  doubt  of  the  power  of  your  ministry  and  its  popularity.  It  is  true, 
and  we  recognize  it  proudly,  that  you  love  the  poor  of  your  parishes,  that  you 
welcome  with  charity  the  beggar  who  knocks  at  your  door,  and  that  you  never 
keep  him  waiting  when  he  calls  you  to  his  bedside.  But  the  time  is  come  for 
you  to  occupy  yourselves  with  those  other  poor  who  do  not  beg,  who  live  by 
their  labor,  and  to  whom  the  right  of  labor  and  the  right  of  assistance  will 
never  be  secured  in  such  a  manner  as  to  guarantee  them  from  the  want  of 
help,  of  advice,  of  consolation.  The  time  is  come  when  you  must  go  and 
seek  those  who  do  not  send  for  you,  who,  hid  away  in  the  most  disreputable 
neighborhoods,  have  perhaps  never  known  the  Church  or  the  priest,  or  even 
the  sweet  name  of  Christ.  Do  not  ask  how  they  will  receive  you,  or  rather  ask 
those  who  have  visited  them,  who  have  ventured  to  speak  to  them  of  God,  and 


23^  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  OzanatH. 

who  have  not  found  them  more  insensible  to  a  kind  word  and  a  kind  action 
than  the  rest  of  mankind.  If  you  fear  your  inexperience,  your  timidity,  the 
insufficiency  of  your  resources,  unite  in  associations.  Take  the  benefit  of  the 
new  laws  to  form  yourselves  into  charitable  confraternities  of  priests.  Use 
all  the  influence  you  have  with  Christian  families,  and  urge  them  to  give  ; 
press  them  in  season  and  out  of  season,  and  believe  that  in  compelling  them 
voluntarily  to  despoil  themselves  you  are  sparing  them  the  unpleasant  process 
of  being  despoiled  by  ruder  hands.  Do  not  be  frightened  when  the  wicked 
rich,  irritated  by  your  pleadine,  treat  you  as  communists.  They  treated  St. 
Bernard  as  a  fanatic  and  a  fool.  Remember  that  your  fathers,  the  French 
priests  of  the  eleventh  and  twelfth  centuries,  saved  Europe  by  the  Crusades  ; 
save  her  once  more  by  the  crusade  of  Charity,  and,  as  it  involves  no  bloodshed, 
be  you  its  first  soldiers."  * 

Then  turning  to  the  wealthy  classes,  he  says : 

"  Rich  men — for  if  your  numbers  be  diminished,  we  still  know  whole  pro- 
vinces which  the  general  distress  has  scarcely  touched.  .  .  .  You  were  justi- 
fied, during  the  first  days  of  a  revolution  whose  limits  no  one  could  foretell,  in 
thinking  of  your  children  and  husbanding  carefully  the  provision  that  the 
chances  of  exile  and  spoliation  rendered  necessary.  But  foresight  has  its 
limits,  and  He  who  taught  us  to  pray  for  our  daily  bread  nowhere  advises  us 
to  secure  to  ourselves  ten  years  of  luxury.  .  .  .  Spend  ;  do  not  deny  yourselves 
legitimate  amusements  at  a  moment  when  they  may  be  meritorious;  perform 
almsdeeds  by  furnishing  work  as  well  as  help  ;  do  not  be  afraid  that  you  will 
injure  small  trade  by  clothing  out  of  your  coffers  those  thousands  of  poor  who 
assuredly  will  buy  neither  clothes  nor  shoes  for  the  next  six  months  ;  give  to 
the  asylums  and  the  schools,  and  do  not  forget  those  houses  of  refuge,  con- 
vents of  the  Good  Shepherd,  compelled  by  poverty  to  reduce  their  penitents 
to  a  fourth  and  a  tenth  of  the  usual  number,  and  thus  close  the  door  to  re- 
pentance when  God  is  opening  to  it  the  gates  of  Heaven.  +  .  .  ." 

"  Representatives  of  the  people,  we  respect  the  magnitude  and  the  difficulty 
of  your  task,  .  .  .  but  do  not  plead  want  of  time.  Under  the  fire  of  the  in- 
surrection the  National  Assembly  borrowed  from  the  night  the  time  the  day 
denied  it.  We  saw  you  on  the  barricades  haranguing  the  insurgents,  encour- 
aging the  defenders  of  order.  .  .  .  How  comes  it,  then,  that  we  do  not  see 
you  at  the  post  of  peril  now  ?  Why  do  you  not  rescue  your  mornings  from 
the  crowd  of  petitioners  who  besiege  you,  and  go  and  visit  those  wretched  dis- 
tricts, and  climb  those  dark  staircases,  and  penetrate  into  those  naked  rooms, 
and  see  with  your  own  eyes  what  your  brothers  are  suffering  ?  You  would  in 
this  way  become  acquainted  with  the  utter  destitution  that  reigns  amongst 
them  ;  you  would  leave  behind  you  to  these  poor  creatures  the  memory  of  a 
visit  that  had  honored  and  at  the  same  time  consoled  their  wretchedness,  and 
you  would  come  away  penetrated  with  an  emotion  which  brooks  no  delay.  .  .  . 
And  do  not  plead  want  of  money.  If  the  ordinary  resources  should  come  to  fail 

*  Vide  Extraits  de  V  Ere  Nouvelle,  vol.  vii.  p.  272. 
t  Extraits  de  VEre  Nouvelle,  vol.  vii.  p.  274. 


Life  ami  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  2;^>j 

you,  if  there  should  be  nothing  more  to  hope  for  from  credit  and  reserve  funds, 
hope  everything  still  from  the  generosity  of  France.  Open  a  national  subscrip- 
tion for  the  workmen  out  of  work — not  only  those  of  Paris,  but  of  the  whole 
country  ;  let  your  nine  hundred  names  figure  first  on  the  list  of  its  patrons  and 
promoters ;  let  the  bishops  who  sit  in  the  Assembly  invite  their  colleagues  and 
the  thirty  thousand  cures  of  France  to  proclaim  the  subscription  in  all  the  pul- 
pits; let  the  Minister  of  the  Interior  order  the  forty  thousand  mayors  to  pla- 
card it  and  popularize  it  in  all  the  communes  ;  let  it  be  made  a  question  of 
security  for  the  timorous,  of  patriotism  and  charity  for  all.  Take  in  kind  as 
well  as  money,  and  I  promise  you  there  is  not  a  banker  who  will  refuse  you 
a  bank-note,  not  a  peasant  but  will  bring  you  his  handful  of  wheat."  * 

The  extraordinary  confidence  which  Ozanam  displayed  in 
an  emergency  like  the  present  is  the  more  striking  from  the 
contrast  it  presents  with  the  almost  morbid  nervous  anxiety 
that  was  habitual  to  him ;  but  in  a  national  crisis  his  personal 
individuality  in  some  sort  disappeared.  He  did  not  think  of 
himself,  or  measure  chances  by  his  individual  power  and  re- 
sources. He  looked  at  himself  only  as  a  unit  bound  up  in 
the  grand  whole  of  France,  and  his  trust  in  her,  in  her  elastic 
vitality,  her  moral  soundness  at  the  core,  her  energy,  intelli- 
gence, and  e/an  was  only  second  to  his  trust  in  God. 

Personally  he  did  not  know  what  fear  was.  This  courage 
was  shared  by  his  wife.  "  Thank  God !  Amelie  is  courage- 
ous," he  says  to  more  than  one  friend  whom  he  keeps  informed 
of  their  position  during  the  outbreak ;  and  he  constantly  con- 
gratulates himself  on  finding  a  support  instead  of  a  hindrance 
in  her  presence  throughout. 

"  Amelie  will  have  set  your  mind  at  rest  about  us,"  he  writes  to  the  Abbe 
Ozanam.  "  She  will  have  told  you  that  we  were  safe  and  sound,  although  we 
were  in  terror  for  Charles  Soulacroix,  who  has  been  three  times  under  fire. 
As  for  me,  my  detachment  was  stationed  nearly  all  the  time  at  the  corner  of 
the  Rue  Garanciere  and  the  Rue  Palatine,  then  at  the  corner  of  the  Rue 
Madame  and  the  Rue  Fleurus.  We  had  a  good  many  false  alarms  ;  shots 
were  fired  in  the  neighboring  streets,  and  we  had  to  patrol  the  Boulevards  at 
some  risk,  but,  thank  God,  we  did  not  pull  a  trigger.  My  conscience  was  in 
order,  so  I  should  not  have  shrunk  before  the  danger.  I  confess,  nevertheless, 
that  it  is  a  terrible  moment  when  a  man  embraces  his  wife  and  child  with  the 
feeling  that  it  is  perhaps  for  the  last  time." 

•  ExtraiU  de  I  Ere  XouvelU,  p.  277. 


240  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Oza7iam. 

Ozanara  once  experienced  this  "  terrible  moment "  under 
circumstances  of  peculiar  interest.  One  Sunday  morning,  on 
the  25th  of  June,  he  was  on  duty  as  a  national  guard  with  M. 
Bailly  and  M.  Cornudet  at  a  post  in  the  Rue  Madame.  The 
three  friends  were  conversing  on  the  sinister  prospects  which 
the  prolongation  of  the  struggle  brought  nearer  every  day ; 
suddenly  it  occurred  to  them  that  the  mediation  of  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Paris  might  avail,  if  he  could  be  induced  to  exert 
it,  and  become  the  peace-maker  in  this  disastrous  civil  war. 
They  started  immediately  to  communicate  the  idea  to  the 
Abbe  Buquet,  his  Grace's  Vicar-General,  who  was  just  then 
attending  his  mother's  death-bed  close  by  Ozanam's  house. 
He  warmly  approved  of  it,  and  gave  them  a  letter  in  a  large 
official-looking  envelope,  which  might,  in  case  of  need,  serve 
as  a  pass  through  the  barricades  to  the  Archbishop's  abode. 
It  was  mid-day  when  Ozanam  came  home,  and  told  his  wife 
the  mission  he  was  bound  for.  Her  first  impulse  was  one  of 
natural  wifelike  terror— '•  You  are  going  straight  to  your 
death  !  You  must  not  do  it.  I  implore  you  not  to  go !"  she 
cried ;  but  Ozanam  calmly  proceeded  to  explain  to  her  the 
considerations  which  made  it  impossible  for  him  to  do  other- 
wise. The  insurrection  was  now  overcome  everywhere  except 
in  the  Faubourg  St.  Antoine,  where  the  strife  continued  as 
fierce  as  ever;  this  was  the  manufacturing  quarter,  the  centre 
ot  the  workmen  and  artisans,  and  while  it  held  out  there  was 
no  chance  of  security  being  restored  to  the  city.  Now,  if  the 
Archbishop  of  Paris  went  forth  bearing  the  olive-branch,  and 
the  rebels  accepted  it,  it  would  be,  not  only  an  immense 
mercy  to  all,  but  a  glorious  triumph  for  the  Church.  Madame 
Ozanam  yielded  without  further  opposition  to  these  arguments, 
though  not,  we  may  presume,  without  one  of  those  inner 
struggles  and  bloodless  victories  which  brave  souls  only  know. 

The  three  friends  set  off  to  the  Archbishop.  After  hearing 
the  motive  of  their  visit,  he  said  with  simplicity.  *'  I  have  been 
pursued  by  the  same  idea  since  yesterday,  but  how  can  it  be 
done?     How  could    we  manage   to   reach   the   insurgents? 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  241 

Would  General  Cavaignac  approve  of  the  step  ?  And  where 
is  he  to  be  found  ?" 

The  three  gentlemen  answered  all  these  objections,  and 
assured  his  Grace  that  he  would  be  received  all  along  the  road 
with  respect  by  the  population. 

"  Very  well,"  he  replied.  ''Then  I  will  just  sHp  on  my 
short  cassock,  so  as  not  to  be  noticed,  and  you  will  show  me 
the  way." 

As  he  was  leaving  the  room  a  priest  came  in  in  great  ex- 
citement, full  of  the  fearful  details  of  the  insurrection,  to  which 
he  had  just  been  a  witness.  Monseigneur  Affre  listened  with 
some  emotion,  but  without  flinching  in  his  resolution.  In  a 
few  minutes  he  was  ready;  but  the  three  laymen,  as  if  prompt- 
ed by  some  presentiment  of  the  triumph  that  awaited  him, 
ventured  to  suggest  that  he  should  wear  his  violet  soutane 
and  let  his  archiepiscopal  cross  be  visible  on  his  breast.  He 
replied  with  the  same  simplicity  as  before,  "  You  think  that 
would  be  better  ?  Well,  then,  I  will  put  on  my  violet  sou- 
tane." 

The  populace  did  not  belie  the  promise  of  Ozanam  and  his 
companions.  Nothing  could  exceed  the  veneration,  the  en- 
thusiasm with  which  the  Archbishop  was  greeted  on  his  way 
through  the  streets  ;  it  was  a  triumphal  march  from  the  He 
St.  Louis  to  the  Assembl^e  Nationale.  The  troops,  the  na- 
tional guard,  the  garde  mobile  flew  to  arms  and  sounded  the 
call;  the  men  stood  bareheaded,  the  women  and  children 
knelt  down.  It  was  a  soul-stirring  sight,  for  the  homage  was 
unanimous  and  spontaneous,  as  if  every  one  guessed  instinc- 
tively that  the  Prelate  appeared  in  the  midst  of  that  vast  arm- 
ed multitude  for  some  mighty  purpose. 

General  Cavaignac  received  him  with  every  mark  of  admira- 
tion and  respect,  gave  him  a  proclamation  to  the  insurgents, 
and  a  final  ofler  of  mercy  if  they  laid  down  their  arms.  At 
the  same  time  he  warned  him  of  the  danger  he  was  going  to 
run.  He  told  him  that  General  Brea,  who  had  been  sent  with 
a  flag  of  truce,  had  just  been  taken  by  the  insurgents.     The 


242  Life  and  Wo}  ks  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

Archbishop  listened  without  showing  the  least  emotion,  and 
the  General  and  those  present  were  deeply  affected  by  the 
simplicity  with  which  he  replied,  "  I  am  going  "  i^Je pars), 

Ozanam,  in  referring  to  this,  to  him,  most  painful  episodcj 
always  spoke  with  admiration  of  the  extraordinary  placidity, 
the  coolness,  amounting  almost  to  indifference,  which  Mon- 
seigneur  Affre  displayed  from  first  to  last.  There  was  no 
enthusiasm  ;  he  was  not  carried  away  and  uplifted  by  any  feel- 
ing of  "  exaltation  ";  he  was  going  simply  to  fulfil  what  he 
believed  a  duty,  and  he  went  forth  to  the  mission  with  a  per- 
fectly clear  perception  of  its  danger.  On  leaving  the  resi- 
dence of  General  Cavaignac  he  requested  Ozanam  and  his 
two  friends  to  allow  him  to  return  home  alone.  They  pro- 
tested, but  seeing  him  determined  they  feigned  to  accept  the 
dismissal,  and  said  good-by,  but  continued  to  follow  him  at  a 
little  distance.  He  guessed  how  it  was,  and  turning  round 
instinctively  when  they  came  to  the  Pont  des  Saints  Peres,  he 
waited  for  them  to  come  up,  and  then  entreated  them  to  go 
away,  as  their  uniform  of  national  guards  gave  them  the  ap- 
pearance of  an  escort,  which,  under  the  peculiar  circum- 
stances, might  prove  a  hindrance  to  his  mission.  They  yield- 
ed to  this  argument,  and  took  leave  of  him  with  sorrow  and 
anxiety.  It  was  not  that  they  had  any  presentiment  of  the 
terrible  risk  that  he  was  running,  but  they  thought  their 
presence  would  be  a  moral  support,  and  they  could  not  bear 
to  let  him  go  on  quite  alone. 

The  Archbishop  returned  to  his  palace  amidst  the  same  de- 
monstrations of  sympathy  wherever  he  was  recognized.  On 
reaching  home  he  was  exhausted  by  the  long  walk,  and, 
after  taking  some  refreshment,  was  persuaded  to  lie  down  and 
rest.  After  this  he  went  to  confession,  like  a  man  about  to 
meet  death.  He  left  some  few  written  directions,  and  then 
set  out  to  the  Faubourg  St.  Antoine,  accompanied  by  his 
Vicars-General,  the  Abbe  Jacquemet  and  the  Abbe  Ravinet. 
As  they  went  along  he  commented  on  the  text,  "  The  good 
shepherd  giveth  his  life  for  his  flock."     He  continued  still  in 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  243 

the  same  state  of  placid  calm,  as  if  taking  a  walk  for  ordinary 
purposes.  We  know  how  it  ended — how  the  olive-branch 
was  changed  into  the  palm,  and  how  the  mission  terminated 
in  martyrdom  for  the  good  shepherd.  As  they  approached 
the  Place  de  la  Bastille,  a  young  man  named  Brechemin,  who 
had  been  following  them  for  some  time,  tied  his  handkerchief 
to  tlie  branch  of  a  tree,  and  went  before  them,  holding  it  aloft, 
to  the  nearest  barricade.  The  Archbishop  climbed  up,  holding 
the  promise  of  pardon  in  his  hand,  when  a  shot  was  fired  from 
a  window  just  above  him,  and  he  staggered  back  wounded  to 
death,  exclaiming  as  he  fell,  "  May  ray  blood  be  the  last 
shed !" 

It  was  about  seven  in  the  evening,  but,  owing  to  the  dis- 
order and  excitement  which  ensued,  the  event  was  not  known 
in  the  city  until  the  next  day,  when  the  news  was  received 
with  a  universal  cry  of  dismay,  horror,  and  grief.  It  fell,  as 
may  be  imagined,  with  indescribable  distress,  amounting  in 
the  first  moments  to  an  agony  of  remorse,  on  Ozanam  and  his 
two  companions;  nor  was  it  until  the  storm  had  passed  away, 
and  they  were  enabled  to  look  at  events  in  their  true  propor- 
tions, that  they  were  consoled  for  their  involuntary  share  in 
the  catastrophe.  It  is  more  than  probable  that,  even  if  they 
had  not  gone  to  the  Archbishop,  he  would  have  acted  on  the 
impulse  which,  as  he  told  them,  had  been  pursuing  him  since 
the  previous  day,  and  gained  his  crown  through  some  other 
instrumentahty.  His  dying  prayer  was  heard:  his  death 
seemed  to  deal  the  last  blow  at  the  insurrection,  and  his  blood 
was,  as  far  as  we  know,  the  last  shed  in  this  fratricidal  war ; 
for  it  was  not  a  revolutionary  riot,  an  imeute^  but,  as  Ozanam 
said,  "  a  civil  war — that  is  to  say,  the  most  implacable  of  all 
wars,  and  which  only  waits  for  an  opportunity  to  break  out 
afresh." 

Ozanam  was  disappointed  but  not  crushed  by  the  results  of 
the  Revolution. 

"You  know,"  he  writes  to  M.  Foisset,  "that  I  have  always  belonged  to 
what  M,  Lenormant  calls  (he  party  0/ hope.     I  believed,  I  still  believe,  in  the 


244  L\f<^  ^^^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

possibility  of  Christian  democracy  ;  in  fact,  I  believe  in  nothing  else  as  far  as 
politics  are  concerned.  I  have  poured  out  the  overflow  of  my  heart  in  an  article 
aux gens  de  bien,  which  you  have  perhaps  read." 

This  article,  from  which  we  have  already  quoted,  ends 
with  the  following  appeal : 

"  Beware — for  this  is  the  peril  of  loyal  souls  and  noble  hearts— beware  of 
despairing  of  your  age ;  beware  of  that  faintheartedness  which  leads  so  many 
to  give  up  all  effort  when  witnessing,  as  they  say,  the  decline  of  France  and  of 
civilization,  and  who,  by  dint  of  announcing  the  approach  of  the  country's 
ruin,  end  by  precipitating  it." 

It  was  not  indeed  a  moment  to  give  up  effort,  but,  on  the 
contrary,  one  which  called  peremptorily  for  strenuous  ex- 
ertion. Chomage,^  that  untranslatable  word  so  full  of  terrors 
to  the  Government,  was  abroad  all  through  the  country, 
reigning  like  a  ghastly  potentate  among  the  populations  of 
the  large  manufacturing  towns  and  in  the  rural  districts,  defy- 
ing all  efforts  to  cope  with  it,  and  accumulating  distress  to  a 
degree  which  justified  the  worst  fears  of  the  Pessimists,  and 
explained  that  touching  exclamation  of  a  Sister  of  Charity  to 
Ozanam,  "  Oh  yes,  I  fear  death,  but  not  near  so  much  as  the 
coming  winter ! " 

He  was  indefatigable  in  his  endeavors  to  communicate  this 
fear  to  those  who  might  yet  help  to  avert  its  worst  realization, 
and  trumpeted  forth  warnings,  appeals,  schemes,  and  denuncia- 
tions day  after  day  in  the  columns  of  the  Ere  Nouvelle, 

**  This  newspaper  takes  up  every  moment  of  time  that  I  can  snatch  from  the 
examinations  just  now,"  he  writes  to  his  brother  on  the  3d  of  July.  "  I  have 
written  five  long  articles  this  week.  It  is  true,  that  in  the  midst  of  the  ex- 
citement of  recent  events  I  am  incapable  of  any  other  work.  We  have,  more- 
over, the  consolation  of  feeling  that  we  are  doing  some  good,  for  they  have 
been  selling  eight  thousand  copies  a  day  in  the  streets  of  Paris." 

It  was  not  quite  true  to  say  that  he  found  time  for  nothing 
else  than  the  duties  of  professor  and  journalist.  He  never  let 
a  day  pass  without  going  to  visit  the  poor,  and  that  immense 
population  of  workmen  whom  the  Chomage  had  reduced  to 

•  The  standing  still  for  want  of  work. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  245 

misery  and  starvation  in  the  great  metropolis.  This  was  the 
enemy  whom  \\\Qge?is  de  bien  had  now  to  fight  against  and 
conquer  under  penalty  of  seeing  it  rise  up  presently  more  fierce 
and  exasperated  than  before. 

'•  Now  is  the  time  for  you  to  begin  your  war,"  says  Ozanam  ;**...  now 
that  the  troops  are  no  longer  bivouacking  on  the  Boulevards,  and  that  peace 
has  succeeded  to  the  storm,  it  is  right  we  should  make  our  voice  heard,  and 
proclaim  those  truths  which  have  ceased  to  be  dangerous,  and  to  address  to 
good  citizens  a  page  which  there  is  no  longer  any  fear  of  the  evil  ones  picking 
up  and  turning  into  cartridges  for  the  guns  on  the  barricades.  It  is  said  that 
the  gens  de  bien  have  saved  France,  and  it  may  be  true,  for  they  comprise 
France  herself,  minus  the  egotists  and  the  tactions.  .  .  .  But  it  is  not  enough 
to  save  France  once  or  several  times ;  a  great  country  wants  to  be  saved  every 
day.  You  go  and  come  from  one  end  of  the  city  to  the  other  now  in  peace 
and  security,  but  the  danger  which  you  flatter  yourselves  has  disappeared  from 
the  streets  is  hid  away  in  the  garrets  of  the  houses  on  either  side.  You  have 
crushed  the  insurrection  ;  you  have  now  to  deal  with  an  enemy  with  which 
you  are  not  acquainted,  which  you  dislike  hearing  spoken  of,  and  about  which 
we  are  determined  to  speak  to  you  to-day— wwr^  /  .  .  .  Two  months  have 
now  elapsed  since  trade  has  been  in  enjoyment  of  that  peace  which  was  to  re- 
store it  to  life,  and  yet  in  Paris  alone  the  number  of  individuals  out  ot  work 
amounts  to  two  hundred  and  sixty-seven  t/iousand.  They  get  assistance,  it  is 
true,  and  this  fact  lulls  your  conscience  and  your  alarms  to  sleep  ;  but  those 
who  have  the  privilege  of  distributing  the  public  help  are  less  reassured.  They 
go,  for  instance,  to  the  twelfth  arrondisseraent,  one  of  the  strongholds  ol  the 
insurrection,  and  out  of  about  ninety  thousand  inhabitants  they  find  eight 
thousand  families  inscribed  on  the  list  of  the  benevolent  fund,  twenty-one 
thousand  nine  hundred  and  ninety-two  who  receive  extra  help,  making  a  total 
of  some  seventy  thousand  individuals  who  are  living  on  the  precariou?  bread 
of  alms.  Half  of  this  district,  all  the  Montagne  Ste.  Genevieve,  and  all  the 
neighborhood  of  the  Gobelins,  is  composed  of  narrow,  crooked  streets,  where 
the  sun  never  penetrates,  where  a  carriage  could  not  venture  without  risk,  and 
where  a  man  in  a  coat  never  passes  without  making  a  sensation,  and  attract- 
ing to  the  doorsteps  groups  of  naked  children  and  women  in  rags.  On  either 
side  of  a  filthy  sewer  rise  houses  five  stories  high,  many  of  which  shelter  fifty 
families.  Low,  damp,  and  noxious  rooms  are  let  out  at  one  franc  and  a  half 
a  week  when  they  have  a  fireplace,  and  one  franc  and  a  quarter  when  they 
have  not.  No  paper,  often  not  a  single  piece  of  furniture,  hides  the  naked- 
ness of  the  wretched  walls.  In  a  house  of  the  Rue  des  Lyonnais  we  ourselves 
saw  ten  married  couples  without  even  a  bed.  One  family  lived  in  the  depths 
of  a  cellar,  with  nothing  but  a  handful  of  straw  on  the  earthen  floor,  and  a 
rope  fastened  from  wall  to  wall,  from  which  the  poor  creatures  hung  their 
bread  in  a  rag  to  keep  it  out  of  the  reach  of  the  rats.  In  the  next  room  a 
woman  had  lost  three  children  from  consumption,  and  she  pointed  in  despair 
to  three  others  who  awaited  the  same  fate.    The  upper  stories  presented  th* 


246  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanani. 

same  consoling  aspect.  Right  under  the  roof  a  garret  without  windows,  only 
pierced  with  two  holes,  each  closed  by  a  pane  of  glass,  afforded  shelter  to  a 
tailor,  his  wife  and  eight  children.  Every  night  they  crawled  on  their  hands 
and  feet  to  the  straw  that  was  spread  by  way  of  a  couch  at  the  extremity  of 
the  garret,  close  under  the  slanting  roof.  We  need  not  dwell  on  those 
amongst  them  who  are  better  off ;  those  who,  for  six  persons,  can  supply  two 
beds,  into  which  are  huddled  pele-mele  the  sick  and  the  healthy,  boys  of  eigh- 
teen with  girls  of  sixteen.  The  most  fortunate  of  these  wretched  beings  want 
food  of  some  sort,  and  if  they  die  of  consumption  let  it  not  be  said  that  they 
perish  from  hunger  in  the  most  civilized  city  in  the  world.  .  .  .  And  here  at 
least  there  is  no  room  for  that  ready  excuse  of  the  hardhearted,  that  the  poof 
are  wretched  by  their  own  fault,  as  if  the  want  of  light  and  of  rhorality  were 
not  the  most  deplorable  and  crying  of  miseries  for  every  society  that  wishes  to 
live  !  Here,  when  the  visitor  accompanies  the  official  help  by  a  kind  word 
that  pleads  for  its  humiliating  insufficiency,  he  finds,  the  more  he  penetrates 
into  the  intimacy  ot  the  poor,  that  they  have  more  blame  than  sympathy  for 
the  insurrection,  and  that  they  regret  the  workshops  far  more  than  the  clubs. 
Even  the  small  number  of  diseased  minds  that  still  cherish  dreams  of  in- 
cendiarism generally  yield  to  a  friendly  and  sensible  conversation,  and  end  by 
believing  in  those  virtues  the  very  names  of  which  they  had  been  taught  to 
execrate — charity,  resignation,  patience.  Amongst  these  inhabitants  of  the 
Faubourgs,  whom  it  is  the  custom  to  represent  as  a  people  devoid  of  all  faith, 
there  are  very  few  who  have  not  a  cross  at  the  head  of  their  bed,  a  picture,  or 
a  bit  of  blessed  palm—very  few  who  died  at  the  hospital  of  their  wounds  of 
June  without  having  opened  their  arms  to  the  priest  and  their  hearts  to  for- 
giveness. In  these  foul  cellars  and  garrets,  sometimes  next  door  to  sloth  and 
vice,  we  have  often  come  upon  the  loveliest  domestic  virtues,  on  a  refinement 
and'intelligence  that  one  does  not  always  meet  with  under  gilded  ceilings  ;  a 
poor  cooper,  of  past  seventy  years  of  age,  tiring  his  infirm  arms  to  get  bread 
for  the  child  of  a  son  who  had  died  in  the  flower  of  his  age  ;  a  deaf  and  dumb 
boy  of  twelve,  whose  education  has  been  carried  on  by  the  self-devotion  of  his 
poor  relatives  with  such  success  that  he  begins  to  read,  and  knows  God  and 
prays.  We  shall  never  forget  one  poor  room,  of  irreproachable  cleanhness, 
where  a  mother,  clothed  in  the  threadbare  costume  of  her  native  place  Auver- 
gne,  was  working  away  with  her  four  daughters,  modest  young  giris,  ^Vho 
only  raised  their  eyes  from  their  work  to  answer  the  stranger's  questions. 
The  father  was  nothing  but  a  hodman,  working  by  the  day  at  a  mason  s  ;  but 
the  faith  which  these  honest  people  had  brought  with  them  from  their  native 
mountains  illuminated  their  lives,  just  as  the  sunbeam  that  stole  m  through 
their  tiny  window  lighted  up  the  pious  pictures  pasted  on  the  walls.' 

This  description  of  the  pariahs  of  the  Faubourgs  was  no 
highly-colored  picture  drawn  to  excite  interest  in  their 
misery ;  it  was  the  truth,  free  from  the  least  conscious  exag- 

«  Bxtraits  de  VEre  Xouvtlle,  p.  265, 


I 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  247 

geratidn.  We  find  many  passages  of  Ozanara's  private  cor- 
respondence which  fully  corroborate  the  public  statement 
both  as  regards  the  fearful  sufferings  of  the  poor  and  the  ad- 
miration which  their  virtues  frequently  excite  in  the  writer's 
mind. 

" .  .  .  If  I  turn  wearily  from  the  controversies  that  are  agitating  Paris,  I  am 
torn  to  pieces  by  the  sight  of  the  misery  that  is  devouring  it,"  he  says  to  M.  Fois- 
set.  '*  The  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  finds  grave  duties  here,  and  it  may 
be  that  God  has  permitted  its  rapid  development  only  that  it  might  be  ready 
for  the  task  He  was  preparing  for  it.  Besides,  it  is  well  to  see  on  their  own 
hearth,  disarmed,  and  surrounded  by  their  wives  and  children,  these  poor  fel- 
lows whom  one  has  seen  at  the  clubs  and  on  the  barricades.  One  is  astound- 
ed to  find  how  much  Christianity  there  still  is  amongst  this  people,  conse- 
quently how  much  there  is  to  work  upon.  Ah,  if  we  only  had  some  saints  I 
But  can  we  doubt  that  God  has  a  few  in  reserve  for  a  century  to-  which  He 
has  given  Pius  IX.  and  the  Archbishop  of  Paris  ? 

"  Let  us  pray,  and  let  us  not  fancy  that  the  end  of  France  has  come  ;  for  at 
the  present  moment  the  end  of  France  would  be  the  end  of  the  world.  When 
we  look  around  us,  where  is  there  a  sound  spot  on  the  face  of  the  earth  ? 
where  do  we  see  a  people  that  are  not  as  grievously  diseased  as  ourselves  ? 
And  yet  can  we  suppose  for  a  moment  that  the  temporal  destinies  of  Chris- 
tianity have  reached  their  final  issue,  and  that  God  has  nothing  more  to  do 
with  the  world  except  to  judge  it  ?  This  is  what  the  Legitimists  said  in  1830, 
this  is  what  you  and  your  party  strove  so  hard  to  prevent  us  all  saying,  this  is 
what  I  trust  and  hope  I  shall  never  say,  not  if  I  saw  the  whole  of  modern  so- 
ciety perish,  assured,  as  I  am,  that  it  would  cost  God  less  to  raise,  up  a  new 
race,  a  new  society,  than  to  limit  the  work  of  His  Son's  blood  to  the  little 
that  these  eighteen  centuries  have  seen  accomplished  ! " 

O^anam  had  started  a  sort  of  crusade  against  this  gospel 
of  despair,  and  the  popularity  which  the  Ere  NovvelU  met 
with  in  all  ranks  and  parties  showed  that  the  deepest  pitblic 
sympathies  were  with  him,  and  that  the  people  responded  at 
heart  to  his  propaganda  of  hope.  He  did  not  confine  him- 
self to  pointing  out  the  evil ;  his  chief  aim  was  to  discover  its 
radical  causes,  and  by  this  means  to  suggest  and  compel  the 
remedy.  He  believed  that  great  things  might  be  done  for 
society  by  improving  its  existing  conditions,  but  not  by  vio- 
lently overturning  them.  "  It  is  within,  not  without,  that  we 
must  seek  for  the  sources  of  men's  happiness  and  its  princi- 
pal enemies,"  he  declares;  **  and  we  shall  have  done  nothing, 


248  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

absolutely  nothing,  so  long  as  we  have  not  carried  light  and 
reform  into  those  internal  disorders  which  time  does  not  right, 
which  are  more  incurable  than  diseases,  which  last  longer 
than  the  chomage,  and  go  on  multiplying  pauperism  long  after 
the  grass  of  the  graveyard  has  effaced  the  last  traces  of  civil 
war. 

"  God  did  not  make  the  poor  ;  He  sends  no  human  creatures  into  the  chances 
of  this  world  without  providing' them  with  those  two  sources  of  riches  which 
are  the  fountain  of  all  others — intelligence  and  will.  .  .  .  Why  should  we  hide 
from  the  people  what  they  know,  and  flatter  them  like  bad  kings  ?  It  is  human 
liberty  that  makes  the  poor  ;  it  is  it  that  dries  up  those  two  primitive  fountains 
of  wealth,  by  allowing  intelligence  to  be  quenched  in  ignorance,  and  will  to  be 
weakened  by  misconduct.  The  working-men  know  it  better  than  we  do. 
.  .  .  God  forbid  that  we  should  calumniate  the  poor  whom  the  Gospel 
blesses,  or  render  the  suffering  classes  responsible  for  their  misery,  thus  pan- 
dering to  the  hardness  of  those  bad  hearts  that  fancy  themselves  exonerated 
from  helping  the  poor  man  when  they  have  proved  his  wrong-doing.  .  .  . 
Of  the  three  passions  which  are  the  ruin  of  popular  morals,  gambling,  wine, 
and  women,  France,  to  her  eternal  honor  be  it  said,  has  banished  the  first, 
and  opened  the  Caisses  d''Epargne,*  with  the  same  hand  that  closed  the  door 
upon  lottery-offices  and  gaming-houses.  .  .  .  But  while  we  have  put  crushing 
taxes  on  salt,  meat,  and  all  necessaries  of  life,  we  have  not  yet  discovered  in 
the  arsenal  of  our  fiscal  laws  the  secret  of  arresting  the  multiplication  of  dis- 
tilleries, of  raising  the  price  of  alcoholic  liquors,  of  restricting  the  sale  of  those 
detestable,  adulterated,  poisonous  drinks  that  cause  more  sickness  than  all  the 
rigors  of  the  seasons,  and  make  more  criminals  than  all  the  injustice  of  men 
combined.  What  reforms  have  you  introduced  into  the  public  amusements 
of  this  Parisian  population,  so  infatuated  about  pleasure,  so  ready  to  let  itself 
be  led  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  not  with  bread,  as  it  has  been  said,  but  with 
amusement  ?  Last  winter  the  Prefecture  of  Police  delivered  /our  thousand 
licenses/or  night  balls.  The  State  puts  no  limit  to  those  unhealthy  diver- 
sions, which  the  good  sense  of  our  fathers  contracted  within  the  six  weeks  of 
the  carnival.  Every  year  it  authorizes  the  opening  of  a  new  theatre  in  some 
wretched  haunt  of  the  Faubourgs,  where  the  sons  and  daughters  of  the  people 
are  fed  nightly  upon  the  scum  of  a  literature  whose  cynicism  would  revolt  the 
chastity  of  the  opera  pit.  And  when,  for  six  months  oi  the  year,  the  youth  of 
the  working  classes  have  spent  their  evenings  and  their  nights  in  these  horri- 
ble dens,  where  their  health  runs  as  much  danger  as  their  morals,  you  are 
surprised  to  see  them  turn  out  miserable  puny  creatures,  incapable  of  supply- 
ing the  military  contingent,  but  supplying  innumerable  recruits  every  year  to 
the  prisons  and  the  hospitals  !  Let  us  not  imagine  we  have  done  our  duty  by 
the  people  when  we  have  taught  them  to  read  and  write  and  count.  .  .  . 
When  it  was  a  question  of  crushing  out  the  last  embers  of  the  insurrection 

•  Savings-banks  for  the  poorer  classes,  protected  and  managed  by  the  State, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  249 

there  was  no  need  of  delays  and  formalities  to  pitch  twenty  camps  on  the 
Boulevards  of  Paris,  and  up  to  the  very  doors  of  the  H6tel  de  Ville  ;  and  here 
we  are,  after  four  months,  when  in  the  twelfth  arrondissement  alone  there  are 
four  thousand  children  without  shelter, — here  we  are  still  struggling  amidst 
adjournments,  motions  and  debates,  fighting  to  overcome  I  know  not  what 
scruples  of  committees,  boards,  administrations,  and  the  rest  of  it,  who  are 
terrified  that  the  State  will  be  ruined  and  overturned  if  the  education  of  the 
yoMu^ouvriers  is  confided  to  Sisters  and  Brothers,  to  teachers  capable,  that  is, 
of  teaching  them  something  more  than  how  to  spell  out  the  syllables  of  the 
newspaper,  and  to  scrawl  the  ordre  du  jour  of  the  barricades  on  the  wall  with  a 
piece  of  coal ! "  * 

In  spite  of  Ozanam's  protests  that  he  was  no  politician,  we 
cannot  read  these  social  articles  without  feeling  that  he  pos- 
sessed the  truest  instinct  of  a  politician,  if  politics  mean  the 
science  of  governing  wisely  and  well;  they  are,  in  fact,  an 
exposition  of  those  principles  of  Christian  democracy  which, 
however  Utopian  they  may  sound,  he  considered  the  best 
practical  solution  to  the  difficulties  of  civilized  states. 

The  newspaper  in  which  these  articles  appeared  was  short- 
lived. There  is  something  almost  pathetic  in  the  story  of  the 
enterprise,  born,  as  it  was,  of  an  impulse  of  hope  and  patriot- 
ism, in  an  hour  of  national  shipwreck,  and  killed,  not  by  the 
Revolution  or  the  Government,  but  by  the  apathy  and  dis- 
cord of  the  very  party  whom  its  mission  was  to  serve  and  to 
enlighten.  The  Ere  Nouvelle  gave  a  voice  to  the  party  of 
hope,  and  held  out  a  beacon  to  those  Catholics  who,  instead 
of  despairing  amidst  the  perils  that  surrounded  them,  en- 
deavored to  secure  the  triumph  of  the  Church  in  the  triumph 
of  democracy.  But  it  was  misunderstood  by  some,  attacked 
by  the  other  Journals  of  the  party,  until  at  last,  seeing  that 
its  mission  had  become  impossible,  and  that  it  could  only 
exist  by  fighting,  not  for  or  with,  but  against  its  own,  it  with- 
drew from  the  lists,  leaving  behind  it,  in  a  few  intelligent  and 
grateful  minds,  the  memory  of  a  brave  career  and  the  echo  of 
a  voice  that  had  faithfully  spoken  the  truth,  irrespective  of 
parties. 

The  P^re  Lacordaire  and  Ozanam  received  many  touching 

*  Extraits  dt  VEre  NouvtlU,  p.  287. 


250  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

testimonies  when  it  was  announced  that  the  journal  was  about 
to  be  suspended.  One  was  characteristic  enough  to  be 
worth  mentioning.  A  freethinker  of  Ozanam's  acquaintance 
wrote  to  him,  condoHng  with  him  on  the  vexations  to  which 
he  had  been  subjected  from  many  quarters,  and  expressing,  in 
terms  as  sincere  as  they  were  glowing,  his  admiration  for  the 
talent  and  noble  sentiments  with  which  the  Ere  Nouvelle  had 
been  conducted.  Ozanam  was  surprised  by  this  unexpected 
proof  of  sympathy,  and  made  the  following  answer  : 

•*  .  .  .  Permit  me  to  say,  ray  dear  colleague,  that  if,  instead  of  re- 
maining outside,  on  the  threshold  of  Christianity,  you  had,  hke  me,  the 
happiness  to  live  within  it,  and  to  have  studied  it  for  eighteen  years  ;  if  you 
had  gone  beyond  Bossuet,  who  undoubtedly  represents  a  portion  and  an 
epoch  of  the  Church,  but  with  the  errors  of  his  time  ;  if  you  had  fed  on  those 
great  doctors  of  the  Middle  Ages,  those  Fathers  whose  works  would  be  a 
study  so  worthy  of  your  noble  intellect,  you  would  not  trace  to  the  Revolution 
either  liberty,  or  tolerance,  or  fraternity,  or  any  of  those  grand  political 
dogmas  which  have  been  claimed  by  the  Revolution,  but  which  descend  from 
Calvary.  You  would  find,  for  instance,  that  my  opinion  concerning  the 
intervention  of  the  secular  arm  agreed  with  St.  Bernard's,  St.  Martin's,  and 
St.  Ambrose's  ;  that  the  Inquisition  of  Spain,  sustained  by  the  Spanish  kings, 
was  blamed  and  disowned  by  the  Popes,  and  that  the  greater  number  of 
heresies  unsheathed  the  sword  before  it  was  raised  against  them.  And  since 
you  speak  so  kindly  of  the  Ere  Nouvelle,  I  may  add,  that  if  you  knew  more 
about  it ;  if  you  knew  the  encouragement  we  have  received  from  Pius  IX., 
from  the  Archbishop  of  Paris,  and  the  most  estimable  members  of  the  clergy 
of  France,  you  would  not  represent  to  yourself  the  few  intelligent  Catholics 
you  imagine  us  to  be  as  a  little  school  of  theosophists,  founded  on  the  ruins  of 
the  old  creed,  and  trying  to  build  up  out  of  its  fragments  a  religion  after  their 
own  fashion  and  on  their  own  level. 

'*  No,  you  must  not  attribute  to  me  an  honor  that  I  repudiate,  that  of  being 
better  than  my  Church,  which  is  yours  also.  For  it  is  to  your  Catholic 
mother  and  your  forefathers  that  you  owe  the  traditions  of  Christian  educa- 
tion, that  you  owe  that  nobility  of  soul,  that  delicate  straightforwardness, 
that  stanch  honesty,  that  have  always  drawn  me  to  you. 

"You  rate  me  too  high,  and  you  know  me  imperfectly,  when  you  assume 
that  I  am  alone,  or  nearly  so,  in  an  order  of  ideas  which  inspire  you  with 
esteem.  I  am  of  the  number  of  those  who  feel  the  want  of  being  surrounded 
and  sustained,  and  God  has  not  let  me  want  for  these  supports.  You  single 
me  out,  and  I  am  but  a  weak  Christian.  You  deserve  to  know  better  ones, 
and  so  you  will  some  day.  You  will  see  that  this  Church,  which  was  never 
without  her  troubles,  which  the  Pagans  of  St.  Augustine's  day  fancied  had 
come  to  an  end,  just  as  did  the  Albigenses  of  the  thirteenth  century  and  the 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  351 

Protestants  of  the  sixteenth,  has  always  had  her  lights,  her  virtues,  and,  above 
all — may  you  experience  it ! — her  consolations,  which  alone  are  equal  to  the 
trials  of  life  and  the  pangs  of  a  suffering  age." 

It  was  in  these  consolations  chiefly  that  Ozanam  found 
strength  to  endure  and  combat  one  of  those  trials  which  was 
severely  felt  by  the  Catholics  of  this  particular  age,  namely, 
the  warfare  of  miserable  bickerings  and  violent  reprisals  car- 
ried on  by  a  certain  portion  of  the  Catholic  press. 

In  the  autumn  of  the  year  1849,  about  a  year  after  the 
death  of  the  Ere  Nouvelle^  a  new  paper,  intended  to  replace 
that  journal,  was  started,  and  Ozanam  was  invited  to  become 
a  regular  contributor.  His  health,  however,  made  it  impos- 
sible for  him  to  comply,  even  if  he  had  been  tempted  to 
throw  in  his  lot  once  more  with  the  journalists.  "The 
Faculty  of  Medicine  have  decided  that  politics  form  no  part 
of  my  regime  for  the  present,"  he  replies  to  a  friend  who 
wanted  to  draw  out  his  opinion  on  some  political  question ; 
and  he  obediently  restricts  himself  to  the  laborious  duties  of 
his  professorship. 

"  Don't  believe  those  ^ho  tell  you  1  am  going  to  re-enter  the  lists  of 
journalism,"  he  says  to  M.  Dufieux ;  "  I  am  too  thankful  that  the  present 
moment  presents  no  urgent  reason  for  compelling  me  to  quit  my  barbarians 
and  my  Fathers  of  the  Church.  The  truth  is  that  the  Archbishop  lends  his 
patronage  to  a  new  paper,  called  the  Moniteur  Religieux^  which  the  Abb6 
Gerbet  is  to  edit,  and  to  which  I  shall  probably  contribute  an  article  now  and 
then.  I  am  sorry  not  to  be  able  to  do  more  for  an  enterprise  which  will  be  so 
useful  if  it  only  serves  to  relieve  us  from  the  responsibility  which  the  Univers 
and  the  Ami  de  ta  Religion  cast  upon  us.  My  dear  friend,  with  the  exception 
of  the  Archbishop  and  a  handful  of  men  around  him,  you  only  meet  people 
who  dream  of  the  alliance  of  the  throne  and  the  Jiltar  ;  nobody  seems  to  re- 
member the  fearful  state  of  irreligion  to  which  this  doctrine  led  us,  and  there 
is  not  a  Voltairian  encumbered  with  an  income  of  a  few  hundreds  who  is  not 
wild  to  send  everybody  to  Mass,  on  condition  that  he  does  not  go  himself. 
Still  I  see  the  slackening  of  that  blessed  impulse  of  return  and  conversion 
which  made  the  joy  of  my  youth  and  the  hope  of  my  manhood,  and  I  ask  my- 
self if,  when  our  hair  has  grown  grey,  we  shall  still  be  able  to  kneel  before 
the  altar  without  hearing  on  every  side  those  hisses  which,  twenty  years  ago, 
pursued  the  Christian  to  the  door  of  the  church.     Let  us  watch  and  pray." 

It  was  natural  enough  that  a  democrat,  so  ardent  in  his 
convictions,  should  feel  some  alarm  on  beholding  the  country 


252  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

lapsing  into  the  same  road  which  had  led  the  men  of  the 
Restoration  to  ruin. 

*'  If  you  knew  their  illusions,  if  you  could  hear  them  talk  !"  he  cries  in  de- 
spair. "  And,  mind,  I  don't  speak  of  the  elders,  who,  on  the  contrary,  are 
the  most  experienced  and  the  most  tractable  ;  I  mean  the  young  men,  states- 
men of  from  five-and-twenty  to  thirty,  who,  in  the  fire  of  their  enthusiasm, 
who  won't  hear  of  such  things  as  a  constitution,  a  national  representation,  a 
press  !  The  worst  of  it  is,  that  religion  is  compromised  by  these  madmen, 
who  pique  themselves  on  defending  it  from  the  Tribune,  and  who  fill  the 
green-room  of  the  opera  with  the  noise  of  their  adventures. 

"  The  Univers  is  working  hard  at  making  the  Church  unpopular,  picking 
holes  in  everything  that  is  most  popular  about  her,  attacking  the  Pere  Lacor- 
daire,  for  instance,  in  order  to  rehabilitate  the  Inquisition.  Confess  that  the 
moment  is  well  chosen !  There  are  two  schools  that  have  striven  to  serve 
God  by  the  pen.  One  sets  up,  as  its  head,  M,  de  Maistre,  whom  it  exaggerates 
and  garbles.  It  presents  truth  to  mankind,  not  by  its  attractive  but  its 
most  repulsive  side.  It  aims,  not  at  conciliating  the  unbelieving,  but  at  stir- 
ring up  the  passions  of  believers.  The  other  school  was  that  of  Chateaubri- 
and and  Ballanche,  and  is  still  that  of  the  Pere  Lacordaire  and  the  Abbe 
Gerbet.  Its  aim  is  to  search  out  all  the  secret  fibres  of  the  human  heart  that 
can  attach  it  to  Christianity,  awakening  in  it  the  love  of  the  true,  the  good, 
and  the  beautiful,  and  then  showing  it  in  revealed  faith,  the  ideal  of  those 
three  things  to  which  every  soul  aspires.  Its  mission  is  to  bring  back  those 
who  have  gone  astray,  and  to  increase  the  number  of  Christians. 

"  I  confess  that  I  prefer  to  belong  to  this  latter  school,  and  I  never  will  for- 
get that  saying  of  St.  Francis  de  Sales,  '  that  we  catch  more  flies  with  a  spoon- 
ful of  honey  than  with  a  barrel  of  vinegar.' " 

Unfortunately,  the  sweet  wisdom  of  the  saying  was  not 
adopted  by  the  school  which  Ozanam  repudiates,  and  whose 
leaders  fully  vindicated  his  judgment  by  their  unwarrantable 
aggressiveness.  He  was  himself  the  least  aggressive  of  men ; 
he  was  never  given  to  sitting  in  judgment  on  others,  and  there 
is  no  instance  on  record  of  his  ever  having  taken  the  initiative 
in  an  attack.  But  this  doctrine  of  reserve  and  gentleness, 
which  be  practised  as  faithfully  as  he  taught  it,  made  him  sus- 
pected in  the  eyes  of  those  who  considered  it  their  duty  to 
hold  the  lash  perpetually  uplifted.  A  man  who  was  so  slow 
to  foredoom  any  one,  however  wicked,  to  eternal  punishment, 
was  likely  to  hold  loose  opinions  on  the  dogma,  and,  accord- 
ingly, on  the  strength  of  this  assumption,  he  was  denounced 
as  a  deserter,  a  Catholic  who  had  ceased  to  beheve  in  hell. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  253 

Ozanam  was  philosophically  scornful  of  such  attacks  in 
general,  but  he  was  stung  to  the  quick  by  this  one.  It  was 
not,  however,  until  he  found  that  the  calumny  was  gaining 
ground,  and  called  for  a  direct  denial,  that  he  condescended 
to  clear  himself.  He  did  this  in  a  letter  to  a  friend  who  had 
momentarily  wronged  him  by  believing  the  charge. 

*'.  .  .1  wished,"  he  says,  "  to  devote  my  life  to  the  service  of  the  faith. 
It  seemed  to  me  that  my  days  would  have  been  well  spent  if,  in  spite  of  my 
own  insufficiency,  I  succeeded  in  gathering  and  keeping  round  my  chair  a 
number  of  young  spirits,  in  reinstating  the  principles  of  Christian  science,  and 
forcing  my  audience  to  respect  what  they  had  hitherto  despised — the  Church, 
the  Papacy,  and  the  Monastic  life.  I  should  like  to  have  collected  these  same 
thoughts  into  books  more  durable  than  my  lectures,  and  all  my  desires  would 
have  been  accomplished  if  a  few  wandering  souls  found  there  a  reason  for  abjur- 
ing their  prejudices  and  coming  back,  with  God's  help,  to  the  truth  of  Catholicism. 

"  This  is  what  I  have  been  striving  for  these  ten  years,  withoutany  ambi- 
tion for  a  higher  destiny,  but  also  without  having  ever  had  the  misfortune  to 
desert  the  field.  And  yet  you,  who  know  me  so  well — you  who  have  received 
the  overflowing  of  my  soul  from  its  verj-  depth — you  who  have  followed  ray 
career  step  by  step,  after  opening  the  doors  of  it  to  me — you  are  ready,  at  the 
bidding  of  a  newspaper,  to  doubt  my  faith  I  A  layman  without  authority, 
without  any  sort  of  mission,  who  does  not  even  sign  his  name,  accuses  me  of 
having,  through  cowardice,  through  self-interest,  betrayed  the  common  cause, 
and  taunts  me  with  what  he  calls  my  denials,  whereupon  you  take  the  alarm, 
and  begin  to  fear  that  I  don't  believe  in  hell !  You  put  me  in  the  painful 
necessity  of  having  to  bear  testimony  to  myself.  Well,  St.  Paul,  when  he  Weis 
unjustly  accused,  had  to  bear  witness  to  himself.  Dear  friend,  should  I  be,  as 
I  now  am,  in  my  thirty-seventh  year,  worn  out  prematurely  with  cruel  infir- 
mities, if  I  had  not  been  actuated  by  the  desire,  by  the  hope,  by  the  delusion, 
if  you  will,  of  serving  Christianity  ?  Was  there  really  no  peril  in  bringing 
forward  the  reli;jious  question,  in  reinstating,  one  by  one,  the  institutions  of 
Catholicism,  when,  a  mere  assistant  professor,  I  had  to  consider  the  philoso- 
phical opinions  of  those  who  held  my  future  at  their  disposal — when  alone  I 
stood  by  M.  Lenormant,  assisted  at  his  cours,  and  supported  him  by  my  pre- 
sence and  my  voice,  when  later,  in  1848,  the  Revolution  passed  daily  under  the 
very  windows  of  the  Sorbonne  ?  If  I  have  had  some  success  as  a  professor 
and  a  lecturer,  it  is  to  courage,  to  work,  and  not  to  base  concessions  that  I  owe 
it.  It  is  true  I  am  nothing  but  a  poor  sinner  before  God,  but  He  has  not  yet 
let  me  cease  to  believe  in  eternal  punishment.  It  is  false  that  I  have  ceased 
to  believe  in  it ;  that  I  have  denied,  dissembled,  or  attenuated  that  or  any 
other  article  of  faith.  And  permit  me  to  add  that  if  my  friends  at  Lyons  had 
seen  the  last  work  I  published,  La  Civilisation  Chritienne  chez  les  Francs^ 
they  would  perceive  that  I  there  attacked  the  most  important  historians  of  the 
present  time  on  every  point  where  they  stand  opposed  to  Catholic  truth,  to  th« 
honor  of  the  Church  eind  the  Papacy. 


254  ^V^  ^^'^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

"  It  is  equally  false  that  I  took  the  initiative  in  this  controversy,  and  gave 
the  bad  example  of  polemics  amongst  Christians.  I  should  not  have  said  one 
word  if  the  Univers  had  not  challenged  me  in  its  disastrous  discussion  about 
the  Inquisition.  I  abhorred  its  opinions ;  I  knew  the  mischief  it  was  doing, 
and  how  strongly  the  Archbishop  disapproved  of  it.  It  summoned  me  by 
name  to  declare  whether  or  not  I  agreed  with  it.  I  seized  the  first  opportunity 
to  assert  that  I  did  not,  but  without  picking  a  quarrel,  without  even  naming 
the  Univers^  much  less  any  of  its  writers ;  without  doing  the  least  thing  to 
give  them  a  right  to  be  abusive  or  personal.  I  am  so  far  from  sharing  this 
fighting  propensity  that  I  thought  it  more  Christianlike  not  to  answer  at  all. 
I  had  a  right  to  remain  silent  if  I  chose,  and  many  advised  me  to  do  so.  For 
the  sake  of  peace,  however,  I  decided  otherwise,  though  I  was  amply  compen- 
sated by  the  great  number  of  estimable  persons  who  loudly  expressed  their 
indignation  at  the  attack.  I  felt  that  it  behoved  me,  nevertheless,  to  justify 
myself  to  you  first,  because  of  your  friendship,  and,  in  the  next  place,  for  the 
sake  of  those  amongst  our  friends  who  may  have  shared  your  alarm,  and  to 
whom  I  beg  you  will  communicate  this  letter." 


CHAPTER  XXIII. 

1850- 

In  the  autumn  of  1850  Ozanam  made  a  tour  in  Brittany 
with  his  wife  and  child.  His  heahh  was  again  a  cause  of 
serious  alarm,  and  he  was  forbidden  to  touch  a  pen  during 
the  holidays.  But  no  prohibition  could  reduce  him  to  com- 
plete idleness.  He  declared,  and  with  truth,  as  regarded  the 
severe  finish  he  exacted  in  his  work,  that  writing  was  laborious 
to  him  as  a  birth,  yet  in  another  sense  it  was  as  easy  and 
spontaneous  as  thought ;  he  could  never  come  upon  a  place 
or  an  event  of  striking  interest  without  being  irresistibly 
moved  to  write  off  an  account  of  it  to  some  absent  friend. 
Thanks  to  this  habit  of  photographing  his  impressions,  a  full 
and  graphic  narrative  of  his  various  journeys  has  been  pre- 
ser\'ed  to  us.  So  it  was  on  this  Breton  tour;  every  incident 
of  the  road  is  related  in  a  series  of  spirited  letters  to  his 
brothers.  When  his  brother  Charles  scolded  him  for  this 
disobedience  to  the  Faculty,  Frederic  disarms  him  by  the 
touching  argument,  "  I  cannot  see  a  beautiful  landscape  with- 
out longing  to  pass  on  my  enjoyment  to  those  I  love."  And 
again  he  urges  as  his  excuse,  "  I  feel  a  pang  when  I  lie  down 
at  night  and  think  that  I  have  done  nothing  all  day ;  a  scrap 
of  letter  looks  like  something,  and  keeps  up  the  delusion  that 
I  am  still  capable  of  stringing  a  few  words  together." 

The  manners  and  customs  of  Brittany,  which  have  proved 
such  a  rich  storehouse  to  poets  and  legend-mongers,  have 
seldom  been  more  faithfully  and  delicately  depicted  than  by 
Ozanam  in  these  rapid  wayside  notes.  The  memory  of  Italy 
guards  him,  however,  from  undue  enthusiasm,  and  compels 
him  to  look  at  Brittany  with  an  eye  which  grander  and  love- 

2SS 


256  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

lier  scenes  have  rendered  critical.  He  is  far,  nevertheless, 
from  spurning  the  beauties  of  the  fair  Bretagne;  he  admires 
the  stern  shore  of  St.  Gildas,  the  glorious  bay  of  Douarnenez, 
the  fresh  valleys  of  Finistere,  and  the  gay  gardens  that  flower 
along  the  banks  of  the  stream  of  Quimper.  But  his  warmest 
sympathies  are  for  the  Bretons  themselves. 

"  Italy  has  fine  landscapes,  but  its  peoples  are  less  strongly  marked  ;  one 
must  go  to  Greece  to  find  such  picturesque  customs,  and  make  the  tour  of  the 
world  to  find  a  faith  so  firm,  men  so  brave,  and  women  so  pure.  .  .  .  We 
have  been  very  fortunate  in  our  sight-seeing.  We  have  fallen  in  with  village 
fetes  {pardofis),  wrestling-matches,  weddings,  and,  to  crown  our  good  luck, 
last  Friday,  in  crossing  the  little  village  of  Ploneven,  we  fell  in  with  a  nume- 
rous company  coming  out  from  a  funeral.  Thirty  or  forty  splendid  men,  all 
dressed  alike  in  blue  doublet  and  white  trousers,  with  long  hair  falling  ;  they 
passed  from  the  church  to  the  tavern  close  by,  to  commemorate  worthily  the 
virtues  of  the  deceased." 

The  pardon  of  St.  Anne  d'Auray,  the  national  shrine  of 
Brittany,  which  is  frequented  by  thousands  of  pilgrims  annu- 
ally on  the  28th  of  July,  was  one  of  the  most  delightful  inci- 
dents of  his  tour : 

"  The  procession — that  is,  the  finest  part  of  the  fete — came  after  vespers. 
Picture  to  yourself  a  green  plain,  sloping  down  to  the  sea,  just  then  glittering 
with  the  parting  beams  of  sunset.  It  was  here  the  cortege  formed  itself, 
opened  as  usual  by  little  maidens  dressed  in  white,  with  our  five  children  * 
bringing  up  the  rear,  and  forming  as  pretty  a  group  as  you  can  fancy  ;  after 
this  came  the  boys,  the  women,  the  sailors,  preceded  by  a  large  flag  of  the 
republic,  and  bearing  on  their  shoulders  a  little  ship  with  a  Madonna  on  the 
quarter-deck ;  then  came  the  priests,  the  statue  of  our  Lady  on  a  litter,  the 
mayor,  with  a  numerous  group  of  men,  and  the  crowd  following  on  behind, 
or  dispersing  so  as  to  get  a  view  of  the  procession  as  it  wound  through  the 
striking  landscape.  The  most  touching  thing  of  all  was  a  young  man  of 
three-and-twenty,  destined  to  the  priesthood,  but  struck  with  a  disease  from 
which  he  will  never  recover.  He  had  dragged  himself  to  the  threshold  of  his 
door,  and  stood  there,  all  in  black,  happy  to  contemplate  for  the  last  time  the 
procession  of  his  native  place.  The  banners  fluttered  gaily,  to  the  pride  of 
those  bearers  who  were  strong  enough  to  make  head  against  the  wind.  The 
statue  of  our  Lady  shone  out  from  afar  in  the  blaze  of  the  setting  sun,  which 
delineated  brightly  the  rigging  of  the  votive  ship.  Above  it  all  soared  the 
chanting  of  the  litanies,  and  the  faith  of  a  people  to  whom  doubt  is  unknown, 
and  the  prayer  of  the  young  deacon  who  was  offering  up  the  sacrifice  of  his 

*  His  little  Marie  and  the  four  children  of  his  host,  M.  de  Francheville. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam.  257 

life  :  how  could  God  not  be  touched  by  the  spectacle  ?    How  could  those  who 
beheld  it  remain  unmoved  ? 

''When  the  hour  for  returning  came,  we  saw  the  litttle  barks  rowing  out 
from  every  side,  bearing  away  the  good  folks  who  had  come  from  the  neigh- 
boring shores  to  Jissist  at  the  fete.  We  did  the  same  ;  and  I  shall  not  try  to 
describe  to  you  the  serenity  of  that  evening  hour,  the  beauty  of  that  sheet  of 
water,  blue  as  the  lake  of  Geneva,  the  flocks  of  sea-gulls  that  seemed  to  rise 
up  from  the  crest  of  the  waves  to  fly  before  us.  We,  meanwhile,  were  seated 
at  the  foot  of  our  mast,  sheltered  by  our  picturesque  sail,  with  our  little  ones 
playing  safely  between  our  knees ;  and  thus  softly  we  were  borne  to  the  beach 
of  the  castle.     .    .     ." 

He  culls  a  legend  here  and  there,  and  sends  it,  like  a 
flower,  in  his  letters  home: 

"In  the  fourteenth  century  there  dwelt  in  these  woods  a  poor  idiot,  who 
went  on  his  way  morning  and  evening,  singing  the  Ave  Maria  and  begging 
his  bread.  He  died,  and  was  buried  like  a  dog  outside  the  cemetery  ;  but 
after  a  few  weeks  there  blossomed  forth  on  his  grave  a  beautiful  lily,  whose 
leaves  bore,  in  letters  of  gold,  Ave  Maria.  The  news  went  quickly  round 
and  stirred  the  inhabitants  ;  pilgrims  and  offerings  poured  in,  and  soon  there 
arose,  like  another  flower,  on  the  tomb  of  the  poor  idiot  that  pretty  church  of 
Notre  Dame  du  Fol-Goat,  laden  with  the  most  exquisite  chiselling  of  Gothic 
art." 

The  interests  of  the  poor  held  their  place  in  Ozanam's 
thoughts  here  as  ever,  and  he  relates,  with  grateful  delight, 
how  at  Morlaix  he  and  Madame  Ozanam  were  affectionately- 
entertained  for  three  days  by  a  family  to  whom  they  were 
complete  strangers,  their  only  link  being  the  brotherhood  of 
St.  Vincent  de  Paul. 

"  I  visited  here  a  conference  just  established,  but  already  working  actively," 
he  informs  his  brother;  ''then  they  insisted  on  my  holding  forth  at  the  Con- 
gress, where  the  savants  of  Britanny  had  assembled  to  discuss  the  improvement 
of  the  equine  race  and  druidical  stones ;  to  sink  the  question  of  the  bards  and 
of  manure.  So  you  see  it  is  no  use  my  flying  from  work  to  the  depths  of  the 
provinces ;  it  seizes  me  on  the  way :  and  I  had  at  Morlaix  not  a  little  Sor- 
bonne,  but  a  downright  College  de  France,  with  the  fairer  half  of  mankind 
amongst  my  audience.  I  did  not  pay,  however,  for  this  disobedience  to  my 
Hippocrates,  and  I  was  brisk  enough  to  set  out  on  Saturday  in  the  most  re- 
markable vehicle  that  we  have  yet  seen.  A  passer-by  exclaimed,  on  beholding 
our  venerable  equipage  :  '  The  inventor  of  that  chariot  ought  to  have  taken 
out  a  patent ! '  " 

He  bears  testimony  to  the  patriarchal  hospitality  which 


258  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

greeted  him  everywhere  in  the  old  manors  and  keeps  of  Brit- 
tany, where  he  witnessed  "  domestic  virtues  and  traditions  of 
honor,  too  rare  in  France  nowadays,  unfortunately."  But 
he  is  less  satisfied  with  the  state  of  political  feeling  amongst 
his  hosts. 

"  I  have  come  across  the  strangest  opinions,  Legitimist  passions  excited  by 
the  accounts  from  Wiesbaden,  and  the  programme  of  M.  de  Barthelemy 
everywhere  received  with  transports  of  joy  by  people  who  desire  absolute 
royalty.  And  yet  outside  the  castles  I  see  few  signs  to  confirm  these  hopes. 
The  peasantry  would  fight  again  for  their  altars  ;  they  would  not  give  a  drop 
of  their  blood  to  the  parties  that  are  fighting  for  power.  In  the  bottom  of 
their  hearts  they  incline  towards  royalty,  but  with  a  singular  indifference,  and 
a  perfect  disposition  to  let  any  government  have  its  way  so  long  as  it  does  not 
close  their  churches.  I  have  seen  in  Morbihan,  the  classic  land  of  Chouan- 
nerie,*  the  Republican  flag  carried  before  the  statue  of  the  Blessed  Virgin, 
and  the  villagers  decked  in  tricolor  ribbons  at  their  weddings,  while  the  gen- 
tlemen wore  green  and  white  ones.  I  saw  them  dancing  in  rounds  to  the 
tune  of  a  song  whose  burden  was  Vive  Napoleon  !  and  I  heard  grandes  dames 
bewail  the  apathy  of  those  louts  who  actually  have  the  bad  taste  not  to  go  and 
get  themselves  shot  in  order  to  restore  to  these  ladies  their  tabourets  at  Court. 
M.  de  Carne,  whom  I  met  at  Quimper,  assures  me  that  the  clergy  in  these 
parts  tend  toward  democracy." 

We  should  form  a  very  incorrect  idea  of  Ozanam  if  we  re- 
presented him  as  always  absorbed  in  wise  thoughts  or  philo- 
sophical observations.  "  No  one  enjoyed  les  bonnes  be'tises 
more  than  he  did,"  says  a  friend  who  knew  him  all  his  life. 
He  never  grew  too  wise  for  so  "  great  a  happiness  in  life  as 
laughter,"  but  retained  to  the  last  that  frank,  almost  boyish 
gayety  which  rendered  his  society  so  attractive  to  the  young. 
Even  when  physical  suffering  and  languor  checked  the  spark- 
ling flow  of  his  animal  spirits,  it  only  required  the  lightest 
touch  to  set  them  in  motion,  and  make  him  break  out  into 
some  ebullition  of  fun  or  espieglerie. 

"  Few  knew  better  how  to  clothe  a  rebuke  in  a  witty  report le,  as  once,  for 
instance,  during  this  very  tour  in  Brittany.  He  happened  to  be  travelling  in 
the  diligence  with  a  young  soldier,  who  was  annoying  a  modest-looking  girl 
by  his  forward  attentions  ;  Ozanam  said  something  about  chivalry  being  the 
first  duty  of  a  soldier,  upon  which  the  aggressor  bade  him  mind  his  own  con- 
cerns, adding  that  it  was  no  business  of  his  to  lecture  people.     '  You  are  mis- 

*  Sobriquet  given  during  the  Revolution  to  the  cause  of  the  royalists  of  La  Vendee, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  259 

taken,  my  friend  ;  that  is  precisely  my  business,'  retorted  Ozanam  :  *  I  am 
paid  by  the  State  for  lecturing  you.' " 

This  Breton  journey  would  seem  to  have  furnished  innu- 
merable opportunities  for  fun  of  one  kind  or  another.  The 
memory  of  one  of  them  survives  in  the  shape  of  a  burlesque 
poem  addressed  to  M.  Ampere,  who  was  to  have  joined  the 
tourists,  but  played  false  to  the  rendezvous,  and  went  off  on 
a  scientific  mission  instead.  The  verses  are  bright  and  clever 
in  themselves,  but  they  sounded  inimitable  when  Ozanam 
suddenly  burst  out  with  them,  as  if  to  relieve  the  vehemence 
of  his  indignation,  while  the  party  were  driving  through  the 
lovely  landscape  round  their  host's  the  Vicomte  de  la  Ville- 
marque's  property.  It  still  provokes  the  laughter  of  those 
who  remember  the  force  and  manner  of  the  improvisatore  as 
he  uttered  the  opening  lines,  furiously  emphasizing  the  last 
word: 

**  Tandis  qu'enfourchant  rhippogriffe, 
Vous  courez  apres  I'hieroglyphe, 
Qu'un  diable  ecrivit  de  sa  grifle 
Sur  quelque  obelisque  apociyphe, 
Notre  amitie  s'en  ebouriffe, 
Et  demande  que  Ton  vous  biflFe 
Du  livre  des  preux  chevaliers."  * 

His  fury,  however,  quickly  subsided  into  a  milder  tone,  and 
he  informs  the  truant  that  "  litde  Marie  is  in  excellent  health, 
growing  like  a  Httle  flower";  that  she  is  beginning  to  read, 
and,  if  the  absentee  delays  much  longer,  *'  she  will  write  to 
him."  The  threat  apparently  did  not  terrify  the  traveller  to  the 
desired  effect,  for,  in  the  February  of  the  next  year  (1851),  we 
hear  Ozanam  still  sending  forth  appeals  to  him  to  come  home 
and  leave  the  Neapolitans  to  the  enjoyment  of  their  "  cloud- 
less sky,  and  their  blue  sea,  and  their  volcano,  so  admirably 
placed  with  a  view  to  the  picturesque.  .  .  .  Don't  allow  your- 
self to  be  kept  away  by  the  accounts  that  reach  you  of  our 
agitations  and  dangers,"  he  says ;  "  there  are  riots  in  the  As- 
sembly and  excitement  in  the  salons,  but  the  streets  are  perfect 

•  See  p.  300,  Letters,  vol.  ii. 


f6o  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

ly  quiet.  Affairs  are  quietly  drifting  into  the  road  of  proroga. 
tion.  It  is  not  heroic,  but  it  is  convenient;  it  is  provisional ^ 
it  enables  one  to  postpone  the  evil  day — Vheure  des  coiips  dt 
fusil.  Honest  republicans  see  in  it  a  means  of  accustoming 
the  country  to  the  name  of  republic,  and  of  preserving  at  least 
a  slender  remnant  of  universal  suffrage. 

*•  The  Orleanists  think  it  gives  the  Comte  de  Paris  time  to  attain  his  ma- 
jority. 

"  I  say  nothing  of  the  Bonapartists,  who  have  the  upper  hand.  There  re- 
main, therefore,  only  the  Legitimists  and  the  Sociahsts,  two  parties  out  of 
five,  to  oppose  the  prorogation,  and  I  don't  believe  they  are  powerful  enough. 
You  see  that  I  am  not  alarmed,  and  that  I  keep  to  your  school,  which  is  no 
small  merit  in  the  pupil  when  the  master  is  no  longer  there.  Amongst  the 
benefits  you  have  conferred  on  me  since  I  have  had  the  joy  of  knowing  you,  I 
reckon  that  of  having  reassured  me  in  1848,  when  everybody  was  terrified,  and 
having  taught  me  never  to  despair." 

And  yet  there  were  moments  v^rhen  the  temptation  to  de- 
spair was  strong,  when  Ozanam  was  obliged  to  gather  up  all 
the  promises  of  faith  and  grasp  them  passionately,  in  order 
that  hope  might  not  fail  him. 

"  See  ! "  he  exclaims  to  M.  Tomaseo,  "see  how  far  the  great  lesson  of  1848 
is  from  having  taught  men  anything.  There  they  are,  one  after  another, 
making  it  a  point  of  honor  to  declare  before  heaven  and  earth  that  they  were 
never  mistaksn,  and  that  these  momentous  events  have  taught  them  nothing, 
and  upbraided  them  with  nothing.  There  they  are  at  their  old  hatreds  again, 
busy  with  their  petty  every-day  passions,  and  fallen  back  into  the  old  laziness 
that  makes  them  fly  from  everything  like  a  novelty,  doing  their  utmost,  in 
fact,  to  force  Divine  Providence  to  strike  a  second  and  a  heavier  blow.  I  have 
only  one  hope,  but  it  is  a  grand  one.  It  is  that,  in  the  midst  of  the  political 
decomposition  of  society,  Christianity  is  being  more  firmly  rooted,  and  that 
the  faith  has  never  manifested  itself  more  vigorously  than  during  this  year. 
The  multitude,  not  knowing  to  whom  to  go,  has  turned  to  the  onlv  Master 
who  has  the  words  of  eternal  life.  Ah  !  France  is  truly  the  Samaritan  woman 
of  the  Gospel ;  she  has  gone  many  times  to  drink  at  fountains  tliat  could  not 
quench  her  thirst ;  she  will  at  last  attach  herself  to  Him  who  promises  her  the 
living  water,  so  that  she  may  never  more  thirst. 

"I  know  not  how  Europe  is  to  be  reconstituted.  It  is  evident  that  the 
dreams  of  parties  have  vanished,  but  what  one  cannot  fail  to  recognize  is  that 
the  idea  which  civilized  the  barbarians  is  still  moving  the  chaos  of  our  own 
days.  Opinions  stand  armed,  and  are  on  the  eve  of  a  stmgq:le.  but  there  are 
Christians  in  every  camp.     God  scatters  us  under  hostile  flags,  so  that  ther« 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  261 

may  not  be  in  tliis  society,  all  broken  up  into  parties,  a  single  faction  where  a 
few  at  least  shall  not  invoke  and  bless  God  the  Saviour  1" 

There  never  was  a  time,  or  at  least  there  never  had  been 
then,  when  this  division  was  more  complete,  when  parties 
were  more  numerous,  more  violent  and  implacable.  Ozanam 
looked  out  over  the  scene  with  the  anxious,  pondering  gaze 
of  a  man  too  earnest  in  his  patriotism  to  shake  off  his  own 
share  of  responsibility  in  the  general  account.  While  God 
was  teaching  the  nation  this  tremendous  lesson,  it  behoved 
every  man  to  listen  and  learn. 

"  Let  us  learn,  above  all,  to  defend  our  convictions,"  he  says,  "but  without 
hating  our  adversaries;  let  us  learn  to  love  those  who  think  difTerenUy  from 
us,  to  admit  that  there  are  Christians  in  every  camp,  and  that  God  can  be 
served  to-day  as  ever.  Let  us  complain  less  of  the  times,  and  more  of  our- 
selves ;  let  us  be  less  faint-hearted,  let  us  be  worthier." 

He  refrained  as  much  as  possible  from  discussing  politics, 
because  it  was  such  misery  to  him  to  see  the  low  level  on 
which  they  were  placed;  to  see  them  so  misunderstood  by 
those  who,  unlike  him,  believed  it  their  mission  to  lead  and 
direct  them. 

"When  I  see,"  he  says,  "the  monarchical  parties,  whose  fusion  was,  by  the 
way,  to  restore  French  society,  let  loose  so  cruelly,  and  the  Orleanists  them- 
selves so  divided  that  their  recriminations  have  been  filling  the  columns  of 
twenty  newspapers  this  fortnight  past — when  I  see  all  this  I  should  like  to  be- 
lieve in  the  duration  of  the  Republic,  above  all,  for  the  good  of  religion  and 
the  salvation  of  the  Church  of  France,  which  would  be  so  terribly  compromised 
if  events  threw  into  power  a  party  ready  to  recommence  all  the  errors  of  Re- 
storation. .  .  .  We  have  not  faith  enough  ;  we  are  always  looking  for 
the  re-establishment  of  religion  by  political  means ;  we  dream  of  a  Constan- 
tine  who,  with  one  blow  and  one  effort,  would  bring  back  the  nations  to  the 
fold.  The  fact  is,  we  don't  really  know  the  history  of  Constantine — how  he 
became  Christian  precisely  because  half  the  world  was  already  Christian — how 
the  crowd  of  sceptics,  scoffers,  and  courtiers  who  thronged  after  him  into  the 
Church  only  brought  with  them  hypocrisy,  scandal,  and  relaxation.  No  ;  it  is 
not  laws,  but  morals,  that  make  conversions  consciences  must  be  laid  siege 
to  one  by  one.  Look  at  those  two  great  examples,  Paris  and  Geneva,  two 
cities  where,  from  1830  to  1848.  not  a  single  law  was  enacted  in  favor  of  Ca- 
tholicism, and  where  the  conversion  of  souls  has  been  accomplished  with  a 
strength  and  perseverance  that  have  astonished  every  one.  Look  at  the  United 
States,  look  at  England,    Faith  only  flourishes  where  it  finds  a  hostile  or  a 


262  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

foreign  government.  We  must  not  ask  God  to  send  us  bad  governments,  but 
we  must  not  try  to  give  ourselves  a  government  that  will  relieve  us  of  our 
duties  by  taking  on  itself  a  mission  for  the  souls  of  our  brothers  which  God 
has  not  confided  to  it.  Unicuique  mandavit  Deus  de  proximo  mo.  Let  us 
continue  and  extend  personal  proselytism,  but  let  us  abjure  and  abhor  the 
eloth  and  cowardliness  that  would  prompt  us  to  call  to  our  aid  the  proselytism 
of  the  State." 

The  nobler  kind  of  proselytism  was  being  carried  on  gene- 
rously, and  with  fruitful  results,  in  many  quarters.  Pere  La- 
cordaire  was  drawing  the  best  intellect  of  Paris  to  his  feet 
during  the  Lenten  Conferences,  which  he  had  resumed  at 
Notre  Dame.  Ozanam  alludes  to  the  closing  one  as  "  an 
event  in  the  ecclesiastical  history  of  our  times."  The  subject 
was  the  number  of  the  elect.  To  the  Gallican  opinion  on  this 
subject,  Lacordaire  opposed  the  more  consoling  doctrine  of 
the  older  divines  as  to  the  probable  salvation  of  the  greater 
number,  and,  says  Ozanam, 

•*  He  protested  warmly  against  those  men  of  despair  who  see  around  them 
nothing  but  evil  and  damnation.  In  language  more  eloquent  than  any  I  ever 
beard,  even  from  him,  he  proclaimed  the  mercies  of  God  in  favor  of  those  who 
work  and  suffer  ;  that  is  to  say,  in  favor  of  far  the  greater  number.  And  when 
he  commented  on  the  text,  *  Blessed  are  the  poor  !'  the  charity  that  overflowed 
on  his  lips  and  beamed  in  his  whole  person  threw  him  into  one  of  those  trans- 
ports that  one  reads  of  in  the  lives  of  the  saints.  The  thousands  who  thrilled 
to  his  voice  under  the  va  ulted  roof  of  Notre  Dame  asked  themselves  whether 
they  were  listening  to  an  angel  or  to  a  man." 

This  year  was  a  peaceful  and  happy  one  to  Ozanam, 
although  his  health  was  still  a  source  of  suffering  and  anxiety, 
and  rendered  his  professional  duties  oftentimes  a  burden  be- 
yond his  strength.  "  Providence  is  treating  us  this  year 
with  great  tenderness,  like  weak  Christians  who  require  indul- 
gence," he  says ;  and  later  on  he  declares  that,  in  spite  of 
grave  cares  in  the  future,  and  much  suffering  in  the  present,  he 
is  "  as  happy  as  it  is  possible  to  be  here  below." 

He  had  hired  a  country  house  at  Sceaux,  near  Paris,  where 
his  friend  Ampere  came  to  spend  some  days  in  every  week 
with  him.  The  latter  recalls  these  peaceful  visits  in  a  few 
touching  lines : 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  263 

**  It  was  during  the  summer  of  185 1,  seated  on  a  bench,  which  I  can  set.  now 
in  his  little  garden  at  Sceaux,  where  he  had  gone  to  seek  a  little  rest  with  his 
wife  and  child,  that  Ozanam,  already  worn  out,  read  to  me  his  description  of 
paganism.  They  were  the  last  serene  days  of  our  friendship,  the  last  whose 
sweetness  was  not  poisoned  by  the  anxiety  we  were  obliged  to  hide  from 
him." 

Perhaps  the  shadow  of  the  parting  was  already  upon  them, 
though  they  knew  it  not,  and  made  these  days  of  intercourse 
seem  doubly  sweet.  Ozanam  relished  them  with  a  fulness  ol 
enjoyment  tliat  he  had  seldom  before  experienced- 

'J'he  two  friends  worked  diligently  all  the  morning,  then  in 
the  afternoon  followed  endless  walks  and  conversations,  and 
in  the  evening  M.  Ampere  would  charm  his  hosts  by  some 
pages  from  the  MS.  of  his  historical  novel  Hilday  which  had 
already  had  the  triumph  of  Mme.  R^camier's  and  Chateau- 
briand's applause  at  the  soirees  of  the  Abbaye-aux-Bois.  The 
two  mvants  presented  as  perfect  a  type  of  manly  friendship  as 
any  we  can  recall  ^  it  had  kept  all  the  promises  of  early 
youth,  and  now,  in  its  maturity,  preserved  the  bloom  and 
enthusiasm  of  its  dawn.  They  had  no  secrets  from  one 
another;  there  was  only  one  point  in  whicli  their  union  was 
not  perfect ;  but  it  was  the  essential  one,  and  Ozanam  could 
never  refer  to  it  without  a  pang.  The  fire  of  doubt,  as  he 
had  called  it,  which  had  passed  over  his  own  soul,  leaving  it 
purified  and  strengthened,  had  wrought  differently  in  the 
noble  soul  of  Ampere ;  he  had  lost  the  faith  he  had  inherited 
from  his  father,  and  which  that  illustrious  man  had  practised 
with  the  docility  of  a  litde  child  all  his  life.  But  the  son  was 
ill  at  ease  in  his  unbelief;  his  heart  yearned  after  the  lost 
treasure;  nothing  filled  up  the  void,  neither  the  aduladon  ot 
society,  nor  fame,  nor  science,  nor  the  prodigious  resources  ot 
his  rich,  fantastic  imagination ;  his  cup  of  life  was  seemingly 
full  to  overflowing,  but  it  wanted  the  one  thing  which  can 
satisfy  the  infinite  capacity  of  the  human  soul — the  knowledge 
of  God,  the  certainty  of  an  immortal  destiny.  It  was  not 
likely  that  Ozanam  could  come  into  close  contact  with  this 
want  and  not  do  his  utmost  to  supply  it.    A  quotation  froni 


264  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

one  of  his  letters  to  Ampere  will  suffice  to  show  how  taith 
fully  and  tenderly  he  strove  to  render  this  service  to  his 
friend ;  it  was  written  immediately  after  the  latter  had  parted 
from  him  to  embark  on  a  long  and  perilous  voyage. 

"  .  i  .  How  can  you  wonder  at  my  sadness  in  taking  leave  of  you  ? 
...  1  could  not  tell  you  the  cause  of  this  sadness  :  I  could  not  speak  of 
it,  because  I  did  not  wish  to  compel  you  to  answer  me,  and  if  I  write  about  it 
now  it  is  because  it  is  too  late  for  you  to  reply.  If  what  I  am  going  to  say  is 
indiscreet,  the  waves  that  are  bearing  you  to  America  will  carry  away  the 
memory  of  it,  new  impressions  will  efface  it,  and  when  we  meet  six  months 
hence  you  wili  have  had  time  to  forget  what  may  have  pained  you  in  ray 
letter. 

"  Dear  friend,  you  are  continually  starting  on  long  and  fatiguing  journeys 
that,  are  not  without  danger  to  your  health,  already  so  severely  tried.  Bear, 
then,  with  my  anxiety.  You  say  you  are  seeking  to  create  new  sources  of  in 
terest  for  yourself,  and,  with  that  great  intellect  that  God  "has  given  you,  you 
dive  into  every  science,  and  now  you  are  making  the  tour  of  half  the  world  to 
find  some  novelty  that  may  furnish  a  fresh  interest.  And  yet  there  is  a  su- 
preme interest^  a  good  capable  above  all  others  of  attaching  and  satisfying 
your  noble  heart  •  and  I  fear — forgive  me  my  friend,  if  1  wrong  you — I  fear 
that  you  do  not  think  of  it  sufficiently  You  are  a  Christian  by  birth,  by  the 
blood  of  your  incomparable  father  ;  you  fulfil  all  the  duties  of  Christianity 
towards  men  ;  but  are  there  not  others  to  be  fulfilled  towards  God  ?  Must  we 
not  serve  Him,  and  live  in  close  intercourse  with  Him  ?  Would  you  not  find 
this  intercourse  a  source  of  infinite  consolation  r  Would  you  not  find  there 
security  for  eternity  ? 

'*  You  have  more  than  once  allowed  me  to  surmise  that  these  thoughts 
were  not  foreign  to  your  heart.  Your  studies  have  brought  you  into  com- 
munication with  many  great  Christians  ;  you  have  seen  many  eminent  men 
around  you  end  their  lives  in  the  Christian  religion  ;  these  examples  invite 
you,  but  you  are  arrested  by  the  difficulties  of  the  laith.  Dear  and  excellent 
friend,  I  have  never  discussed  these  difficulties  with  you,  because  you  have  in- 
finitely more  knowledge  and  intellect  than  I  have.  But  let  me  tell  you,  never- 
theless, there  are  but  two  things,  Religion  and  Philosophy.  Philosophy  has 
lights ;  it  has  known  God,  but  it  does  not  love  Him  ;  it  has  never  called  forth 
one  of  those  tears  of  love  that  a  Catholic  sheds  at  the  moment  of  Communion, 
and  whose  incomparable  sweetness  is  worth,  in  itself  alone,  the  sacrifice  of  an 
entire  life.  If  I,  who  am  so  weak  and  bad,  have  experienced  this  sweetness 
what  would  it  not  be  with  you,  whose  nature  is  so  elevated  and  whose  heart 
is  so  good  !  You  would  find  there  that  internal  evidence  before  which  every 
doubt  vanishes.  Faith  is  an  act  of  virtue,  consequently  an  act  of  the  will. 
We  must,  once  for  all,  will^  we  must  give  our  soul  to  God,  and  then  He  gives 
us  the  fulness  of  light. 

*'  Ah  1  if  some  day  you  fell  ill  in  a  distant  city  of  America,  without  a  friend 
by  your  bedside,  remember  tliat  there  13  not  a  town  of  any  importance  id 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  265 

the  United  States  where  the  love  of  Jesus  Christ  has  not  guided  a  priest  to 
console  the  Catholic  traveller.  ..." 

This  appeal  met  with  a  frank  response.  Ampere  promised 
that  he  would  pray  for  this  fulness  of  Hght,  and  seek  it  perse- 
veringly.  Fifteen  years  after  the  date  of  the  above  letter  he 
wrote  to  one  who  had  his  confidence  and  Ozanam's  :  "  I  will 
persevere  honestly  in  seeking  for  the  truth ;  no  one  longs  for 
it  more  sincerely  than  I  do,  and  every  night  of  my  life  I  send 
up  to  God  the  prayer,  Give  me  light/''  The  prayer  was 
heard,  but  only  when  death  came  and  drew  aside  the  veil 
which  had  hung  between  the  soul  of  Ampere  and  the  hght  of 
eternal  truth  and  mercy. 

The  famous  Exhibition  of  the  Crystal  Palace  was  drawing 
all  the  nations  of  the  earth  to  London  in  the  summer  of  1851, 
and  Ozanam  allowed  himself  to  be  persuaded  by  Ampere  into 
falling  in  with  the  stream  of  visitors.  He  and  Madame 
Ozanam  set  off,  with  this  indefatigable  traveller  for  cicerone, 
in  the  first  week  of  August.  The  wonders  of  the  great  com- 
mercial city,  with  its  wealth  and  solid  prosperity,  were  not 
much  calculated  to  awaken  the  enthusiasm  of  the  poet-mind 
which  had  been  inspired  by  the  legends  of  St.  Francis  and  the 
wild  beauties  of  his  native  hills.  Ozanam  was  astounded  and 
overpowered  by  London  rather  than  charmed.  He  describes 
it  as 

"  The  most  imposing  city  in  the  world,  when,  through  the  mist  which  en- 
velops ard  magnifies  it,  you  first  catch  sight  of  the  semicircle  on  the  banks  of 
the  Thames,  with  its  forest  of  steeples,  columns,  porticos,  and,  towering  above 
them  all,  the  dome  of  St.  Paul's.  But  when  you  come  nearer  and  examine 
these  monuments,  all  black  and  disproportioned,  you  find  they  are  nothing 
but  a  failure— the  failure  of  riches  to  procure  what  gold  cannot  buy,  to  trans- 
plant to  an  ungrateful  soil  the  inspirations  of  Italy  and  France.  In  the  midst 
of  these  wretched  imitations  there  are,  however,  two  striking  exceptions, 
Westminster  Abbey  and  the  new  Houses  of  Pariiament.  .  .  .  As  to  the 
Exhibition,  nothing  can  be  finer  than  the  order  in  which  the  infinite  variety  of 
human  riches  has  been  collected  together  in  one  edifice.  Savants  are  delighted 
with  the  marvels  already  wrought  by  machinery,  and  those  still  greater  that 
it  promises  ;  but  if  we  except  the  Chinese  and  Indian  departments,  I  am  quite 
disenchanted  by  the  monotonous  uniformity  in  which  material  civilization 
threatens    to    envelop    the    whole    world.    .  .  .  This    Exhibition  include* 


266  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

nothing  but  articles  of  luxury,  things  which  the  wealthy  classes  alone  want 
and  pay  for.  The  fictitious  wants  of  this  class  are  the  same  all  over  the 
world  ;  a  set  of  diamonds  destined  for  the  Queen  of  Spain  is  the  exact  twin  of 
one  that  is  to  deck  the  Empress  of  Russia.  God  made  the  earth  with  an  end- 
less variety  that  was  pleasant  to  the  eyes ;  industry  threatens  to  cover  it  with 
a  uniformity  that  will  engender  disgust  and  weariness.  For  my  part,  after 
beholding  this  epitome  of  human  power  at  the  end  of  nearly  sixty  centuries, 
I  said  to  myself,  '  What !  can  man  do  no  more  than  this  ?  The  supreme 
effort  of  his  genius  is  to  cross  silk  with  gold,  to  mix  emerald  leaves  with 
diamond  flowers  ! '  And  I  went  out  and  was  glad  to  see  the  greensward  of 
the  Park,  the  groups  of  noble  trees  with  the  sheep  grazing  under  their  shade, 
and  all  those  things  that  industry  had  not  made." 

The  true  exhibition,  the  one  which,  in  his  opinion,  gave 
the  most  accurate  impression  of  England's  power  and  wealth, 
was  not  the  industrial  collection  of  the  fairy  edifice  on  the 
Serpentine,  but  the  Docks,  where  her  commerce  keeps  its 
treasury. 

"Above  the  bridges  there  is  a  city  of  luxury,  a  great  capital,  where  foreign- 
ers throng  in  delight  ;  but  below  the  bridges,  going  down  the  Thames,  there 
exists  a  second  city  of  London,  which  is  the  life  of  the  first.  This  one  has  no 
monuments  but  her  vessels,  whose  masts,  closer  and  more  stately  than  all  the 
colonnades  above,  carry  the  British  flag  to  the  most  distant  latitudes.  This 
one  has  a  tunnel  where  you  walk  under  the  river  without  hearing  even  the 
murmur  of  its  waters.  This  one  has  docks,  those  huge  basins  where  twenty- 
five  thousand  ships  find  shelter.  All  round  rise  countless  warehouses.  We 
wandered  through  them  for  hours,  through  streets  composed  entirely  of  boxes 
of  tea,  of  sugar,  of  bales  of  Australian  wool.  Below,  lamp  in  hand,  we  ex- 
plored those  gigantic  cellars  where  the  vintages  of  Spain  and  Portugal  lie 
buried — regular  catacombs,  but  catacombs  of  Mammon,  flanked  not  with 
tombs,  but  with  barrels  worth  their  weight  in  gold.  This  is  the  real  exhibi- 
tion, and  one  morning  spent  in  these  opulent  gloomy  regions  struck  and  im- 
pressed us  far  more  than  the  elegant  galleries  of  the  Crystal  Palace." 

There  was  something  almost  terrifying  to  Ozanam  in  this 
tremendous  accumulation  of  wealth.  While  admitting  the 
necessity  for  its  pursuit  in  legitimate  trade,  and  the  advanta- 
ges accruing  from  the  progress  of  industry,  he  could  not  di- 
vest himself  of  the  feeling  that,  carried  beyond  a  certain 
point,  the  result  had  in  it  "something  dangerous,  something 
of  the  tempter,  something  Satanic,"  and  that  it  was  impossi- 
ble to  display  those  dazzling  treasures  before  the  eyes  of  men, 


Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  26^ 

already  too  enamored  of  the  goods  of  this  world,  without 
detriment  to  their  desires  of  a  nobler  gain. 

"  I  always  seemed  to  see  standing  on  the  threshold  of  the  Exhibition,"  he 
says,  "  the  same  demon  who  transported  our  Saviour  to  the  top  of  the  moun- 
tain, and  to  hear  him  saying  again,  '  All  this  will  I  give  thee  if  thou  wilt  fall 
down  and  worship  me.'  It  looks  to  me  like  a  seal  of  reprobation  on  these 
riches  that  they  do  not  serve  to  ameliorate  the  lot  of  humanity,  the  lot,  that  is, 
of  the  greater  number,  and  that  the  most  opulent  city  in  the  world  is  also  that 
which  treats  its  poor  most  harshly." 

The  extent  of  that  national  and  crying  disgrace  of  Eng- 
land, Pauperism,  presented  indeed  a  painful  contrast  with  tliis 
colossal  wealth.  Ozanam  had  seen  poverty,  /a  misere,  both  in 
Paris  and  at  Lyons,  but  it  was  during  a  period  of  coma  follow- 
ing upon  revolution,  and  was  explained,  at  least  in  its  extreme 
state,  by  the  convulsion  which  had  brought  labor  of  every 
description  to  a  standstill.  Here,  however,  there  was  no 
such  fact  to  justify  the  horrible  excess  of  pauperism  which 
disfigured  the  rich  metropolis.  What  vice  was  there  in  the 
system  to  account  for  it  ? 

"  Why  is  London  overrun  with  b^:gars,  half-naked,  who  pursue  the  stran- 
ger, rushing  under  the  very  wheels  of  the  carriages,  and  bearing  on  their 
countenances  the  traces  of  an  inexorable  despair  ?  The  poor-law  and  the 
workhouse  cannot  deal  with  the  evil.  The  English  cannot  prevent  mendid-. 
ty  from  penetrating  into  London  ;  they  tolerate  it,  and  I  give  them  credit  for 
doing  so.  But  why  then  do  they  insult  so  derisively  the  mendicity  of  Catho- 
lic countries  ?  Never  in  the  streets  of  Rome  did  I  see  anything  approaching 
to  those  women  in  rags  who  hold  out  their  hand  to  you  along  the  Strand  ;  to 
those  little  girls  that  one  sees  in  a  frock  tattered  up  to  their  waist,  with  their 
naked  feet  in  the  cold  black  mud.  And  let  it  not  be  alleged  that  this  is  a  dis- 
play of  misery  got  up  to  move  the  passers-by.  Penetrate,  I  don't  say  even  into 
the  poor  districts  of  Whitechapel  or  Soulhwark,  but  to  the  back  of  those  sump- 
tuous thoroughfares,  Regent  Street  and  Oxford  Street,  and  you  will  find  nar- 
row little  alleys,  dark  and  foul,  which  lead  into  courts  still  narrower,  hedged 
in  with  high  houses.  Here  the  beggars  congregate  ;  they  are  lodged  by  the 
week  ;  a  room  costs,  on  an  average,  from  three  to  four  shillings  a  week — that 
is  to  say,  from  two  hundred  to  two  hundred  and  fifty  francs  a  year.  Many 
families  are  too  poor  to  bear  alone  the  burden  of  such  a  rent,  so  they  unite  to 
share  and  lighten  it,  and  thus  lose  the  satisfaction  which  the  most  wretched 
m/na^es  enjoy  with  us,  that  of  being  all  to  themselves  {cAez  sot).  I  saw  one 
room  and  a  narrow  closet  that  was  inhabited  by  fourteen  persons.  For  some 
time  past  the  police  regulations  have  forbidden  them  to  lodge  in  cellars  ;  but 


268  Life  a?id  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

distress,  which  is  stronger  than  all  other  authorities,  drives  many  workmen  to 
seek  this  last  refuge.  ..." 

These  wretched  haunts  had  a  stronger  attraction  for  Oza- 
nam  than  any  other  sight  in  London. 

"  Better  than  I,"  says  M.  Ampere,  "he  would  leave  me  to  return  alone  to 
the  Crystal  Palace,  that  he  might  have  more  time  to  visit  the  cellars  and  gar- 
rets inhabited  by  the  poor  of  Catholic  Ireland  ;  he  would  come  away  from 
them  with  his  heart  full,  and  always,  I  suspect,  a  little  poorer  than  he  went." 

Few  of  the  monuments  of  London  found  favor  with  Oza- 
nam.     St.  Paul's  he  speaks  of  as  an 

*'  Icy  edifice  which  even  Catholicism  would  have  something  to  do  to  warm 
up,"  supposing  M.  de  Maistre's  prophecy  were  realized,  and  that  tlie  nine- 
teenth century  saw  Mass  celebrated  there.  "  The  true  basilica  of  London,  the 
St.  Denis  of  the  English  monarchy,  is  Westminster,"  he  says.  "There  a 
stately  nave  rises  up  to  rival  our  noblest  naves  of  St.  Ouen  and  Amiens.  .  .  . 
The  Christian  architects  who  erected  this  church  made  it  long  and  wide  to 
contain  the  multitude  of  a  faithful  people,  high  and  aerial  to  waft  the  ho- 
mage of  earth  nearer  to  God.  Behind  the  choir  and  the  high  altar  only,  a 
partition  contained  a  narrow  space  where  the  shrine  of  St.  Edward  was 
placed.  A  tomb  of  stone,  adorned  with  mosaics,  was  the  resting-place  of  the 
holy  king's  remains,  the  popular  king  who  represented  the  historical  souve- 
nirs of  the  Anglo-Saxon  nationality.  The  Norman  princes  never  dreamed  of 
disturbing  the  peace  of  this  sanctuary  ;  all  their  ambition  was  to  rest  near  St. 
Edward.  All  round  the  shrine  you  see  the  sepulchres  of  Henry  III.,  Ed- 
ward III.,  Richard  II.,  and  behind  these  Henry  VII.  built  a  chapel  which  is 
the  pearl  of  England.  But  Protestantism  having  banished  God  from  this 
church,  and  being  no  longer  able  to  fill  it  with  a  living  people,  imagined  the 
device  of  encumbering  it  with  the  dead.  .  .  .  There  is  what  is  called  the 
Poets'  Corner  and  the  Statesmen's  Corner ;  but  the  Dean  and  Chapter 
of  Westminster,  in  virtue  of  some  arbitrary  power,  can,  itseems,  cede  to 
those  who  were  only  rich  the  right  to  figure  amongst  the  great.  Hence  the 
prodigious  collection  of  mausoleums  devoid  of  historical  interest  or  monu- 
mental merit.  .  .  .  Not  satisfied  with  decorating  the  walls,  they  have  closed 
up  entire  arcades  by  piling  up  these  monuments  of  vanity  and  bad  taste." 

P^re  Lacordaire,  in  his  notice  of  Ozanam,  relates  a  char- 
acteristic incident  connected  with  his  first  visit  to  the  Abbey. 

"  He  went  in  with  the  crowd  of  strangers  and  foreigners,  and  found  him- 
self presently  behind  the  choir,  in  front  of  the  tomb  of  St.  Edward.  The 
sight  of  this  monument,  mutilated  by  Protestantism,  filled  him  with  anguish, 
and  falling  on  his  knees  before  the  relics,  such  as  they  are,  of  the  St.  Louis  of 
England,  he  prayed  there  alone  in  expiation  for  that  people  that  no  longer 
knows  its  saints,  to  the  great  contempt  doubtless  of  the  lookers-on,  who  took 
him  for  an  idolater,  if  not  for  a  madman," 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  269 

We  are  not  surprised  to  learn  that  the  indignant  beadle 
hunted  liim  out  of  the  church.  Ozanam  beheld  with  grati- 
tude and  hope  the  progress  of  the  faith  in  the  midst  of  this 
people  where  it  had  once  been  so  flourishing, 

•'Everyday  numbers  new  conversions,"  he  says;  "and  the  example  of 
those  two  grand  souls,  Newman  and  Manning,  continues  to  move  the  hearts 
of  the  most  religious  of  the  Anglican  clergy.  Nothing  is  more  touching  than 
to  see  that  fine  church,  St.  George's  Cathedral,  just  now  threatened,  but  so 
full  of  hope,  a  glorious  witness  to  the  increase  of  Catholics,  grown  too  nume- 
rous to  be  contained  in  the  obscure  chapels  to  which  persecution  had  so  long 
consigned  them.  Nothing  can  exceed  the  recollection  and  fervor  of  the  faith- 
ful there  at  the  divine  offices ;  the  communions  are  very  numerous ;  that  most 
eloquent  prelate,  Cardinal  Wiseman,  here  addresses  English  Catholics  in  the 
long-forgotten  language  of  St.  Anselm  and  St.  Thomas  of  Canterbury,  while 
round  him  are  gathered  a  group  of  zealous  priests  and  laymen,  who  reminded 
me  of  your  church  at  Geneva,*  less  considerable  but  not  less  flourishing. 
Both  prove  in  an  admirable  manner  that  Catholicism  has  no  need  of  the  secu- 
lar arm  to  achieve  the  conquest  of  consciences.  And  this  reminds  me,  my 
dear  friend,  just  now,  that  it  is  so  all-important  to  the  oppressed  churches  of 
England,  Switzerland,  Germany,  and  Poland  to  vindicate  the  principle  of 
civil  liberty.  I  entreat  you  to  prevent  your  excellent  journal  from  constituting 
itself  the  ally  of  those  who  combat  this  principle  in  France  and  Italy.  We 
have  to  choose  between  liberty  for  our  opponents  and  chains  for  our  brothers." 

Though  Ozanam  was  in  antagonism  with  English  institu- 
tions in  their  religious  bearing,  he  found  much  to  admire  in 
the  national  character  and  customs. 

"  There  is  no  denying  the  fine  qualities  of  the  people,"  he  says  :  •'  they  are 
full  of  respect  for  the  law  and  of  love  of  their  country  ;  they  are  indefatigable 
in  their  industry,  and  they  are  religious  too,  if  we  may  judge  from  the  im- 
mense number  of  church-steeples  that  soar  above  London,  and  still  more 
from  the  rest  on  Sunday,  which  is  so  strictly  observed  from  one  end  of  the 
country  to  the  other  by  the  most  work  loving  people  in  the  universe." 

He  is  surprised  and  pained  by  the  spirit  of  pride  that 
separates  the  classes,  but  rather  amused  by  certain  manifesta- 
tions of  it. 

•*  I  visited  some  poor  districts  in  company  with  a  member  of  the  Society  of 
St.  Vincent  de  Paul,"  he  remarks,  *'  and  I  was  able  to  see  what  an  amount  of 
virtue  and  courage  an  Englishman  requires  in  order  to  come  personally  to  the 
assistance  of  this  fearful  misery  ;  not  that  they  are  grudging  of  their  money, 

•  Letter  to  M.  Dufresnc,  ii,  p.  378. 


270  Life  and  JVorks  of  Frederic  Ozatiam. 

but  in  this  aristocratic  land  the  contact  of  indigence  defiles  and  compromises. 
Why,  a  shopman  does  not  give  you  your  change  without  folding  it  in  a  bit  of 
paper  !  How  then  could  a  gentleman  bring  himself  to  press  the  hand  of  an 
Irish  beggar  ?  Our  confreres  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  have,  nevertheless,  been 
enabled  to  overcome  the  prejudices  of  their  birth  ;  they  do  a  great  deal  of 
good,  and  it  was  a  joy  to  me  to  pass  an  evening  in  the  midst  of  them." 

Ozanam  was  not  sorry  to  escape  for  a  day  from  the  "  sad- 
ness of  the  great  city  of  fogs  and  smoke,  with  its  ill-lighted 
monuments,"  to  the  serener  atmosphere  of  Oxford.  There 
all  seemed  to  him  "  steeped  in  peace  " ;  and  he  was  enchanted 
with  the  old  city  of  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries, 

"With  its  noble  colleges  of  Gothic  architecture  or  in  the  style  of  the 
Renaissance.  One  wanders  through  their  vast  cloisters,  their  fine  gardens, 
where  there  is  nothing  to  remind  you  of  the  difference  of  centuries.  The  col- 
leges of  Christ's  Church  and  St.  Magdalen  charmed  us  above  all,  and  we  were 
seriously  tempted  to  take  up  our  abode  there  ;  for  though  celibacy  is  the  rule 
in  these  communities,  there  is  an  exception  in  favor  of  the  canons  of  Christ's 
Church.  I  was  much  interested  also  in  the  Bodleian  library.  Mind  and  tell 
Daremberg  that  his  friend  Mr.  Coxe  gave  us  a  most  gracious  welcome.  He 
showed  us  the  celebrated  Arundel  marbles,  and  took  us  over  the  University  ; 
he  charmed  us  by  that  mixture  of  science,  urbanity,  and  ttatvete  which,  renders 
him  the  worthy  inhabitant  of  this  venerable  place." 

The  journey  to  England  did  not,  on  the  whole,  produce 
any  decided  improvement  in  the  traveller's  health.  It  rested 
and  amused  him,  but  he  returned  to  his  little  country  house 
at  Sceaux  no  better,  radically,  than  when  he  had  left  it.  At 
the  end  of  October  he  writes  to  M.  Ampere,  still  absent  in 
America  :  "  I  work  a  little,  but  with  difficulty ;  I  cover  a  page 
while  you  are  flying  over  fifty  leagues.  I  find,  nevertheless, 
a  certain  benefit  in  the  mere  repose  of  the  country,  in  this 
sojourn  at  Sceaux,  where  the  leaves  are  departing,  but  whence 
peace  departs  not.  From  the  window  where  I  write  I  hear 
the  merry  voice  of  my  little  Marie,  playing  in  the  garden ; 
and  Amelie,  seated  close  by,  rejoices  me  by  her  look  of 
health.  .  .  ."  The  belief  that  his  own  health  was  vitally  im- 
paired was  now  close  upon  him,  but  he  met  it  with  courage 
and  resignation ;  his  only  regret,  as  far  as  he  considered  him- 
self personally,  was  that  he  had  achieved  so  little,  and  was 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  271 

likely  to  be  called  away  at  the  moment  when  the  labors  of  his 
life  might  have  been  rendered  useful  in  some  worthier  and 
more  permanent  form.  But  even  in  his  most  intimate  corre- 
spondence he  avoided  dweUing  on  this  subject;  he  would  say 
just  enough  to  satisfy  the  claims  of  friendly  anxiety,  and  then 
turn  to  more  cheerful  topics.  This  did  not  cost  him  any 
extraordinary  effort;  he  retained  to  the  last  the  charming 
faculty  of  being  interested  in  everything,  great  and  small,  that 
came  within  his  observation.  M.  Ampere's  tour  in  the  United 
States  was  just  now  a  source  of  the  liveliest  interest  to  him, 
although  he  had  been  so  averse  to  his  friend's  embarking  on 
the  expedition. 

"  When  I  so  strenuously  opposed  your  Transatlantic  voyage,"  he  says,  **  I 
was  only  actuated  by  the  egotism  of  friendship  ;  don't  fancy  that  I  am  an 
enemy  to  the  Yankees,  and  don't,  I  implore  of  you,  get  me  into  any  sort  of 
trouble  with  that  great  people.  They  will  probably  realize  the  political  ideal 
to  which,  in  my  opinion,  modern  society  is  tending.  All  that  you  tell  me  of 
Quebec  and  Montreal  touches  me  deeply ;  above  all,  the  joy  you  had  in  find- 
ing the  name  of  your  illustrious  father  still  living  there.  I  am  delighted  to 
see  you  seated  at  the  family  banquet  of  our  brothers  beyond  the  ocean.  But 
don't  suppose  me  indifferent  to  the  good  luck  you  had  in  coming  in  time  for 
the  festivities  of  Boston.  I  am  far  from  making  small  account  of  the  speeches 
of  the  President  of  the  United  States,  and  very  far  from  despising  those  pro- 
cessions of  workingmen  of  which  the  calm  and  well- disciplined  democracy  of 
America  gives  us  the  spectacle.  They  are  better  than  our  armed  bands  of 
Cher  and  Nievre.  Keep  your  eyes  wide  open,  observe  everything,  and  you 
will  come  back  very  opportunely  in  1852  ;  for,  to  speak  out  quite  plainly,  1852 
has  begun  this  last  fortnight,  and  affairs  begin  to  be  nicely  complicated.  Even 
if  you  wait  till  the  month  of  April,  I  don't  guarantee  that  you  will  find  your 
fauteuil  at  the  Academy ;  it  may  have  gone  to  boil  the  soup  of  the  insur- 
gents !  Happy  mortal  !  you  will  not  see  the  smoke  of  our  conflagrations  ;  you 
will  be  yonder,  on  those  peaceful  shores,  ready  to  receive  your  fugitive 
friends  ;  you  will  patronize  Madame  Ozanam,  and  help  her  to  set  up  a  flower- 
stall  in  Broadway.  As  to  me,  my  stock  of  English  would  not  enable  me  to 
exercise  my  small  talents  of  barrister  and  professor,  so  I  see  no  career  open  to 
me  but  to  beat  the  big  drum  behind  my  brother's  carriage  when  he  goes  driv- 
ing about  to  pull  out  teeth.  And  this  is  to  be  the  finale  of  the  Ozanam  family, 
that  had  seemed  to  promise  such  great  things  !  .  .  . 

'♦  Adieu,  my  friend  ;  may  the  winds  fill  your  sails  in  the  right  direction  ;  let 
them  blow  you  whither  they  will,  they  will  never  carry  you  to  a  corner  of  the 
earth  where  our  thoughts  do  not  follow  you.  Even  our  little  Marie  is  au 
courant  of  your  f>eregrinations  ;  you  are  teaching  her  geography,  and  she  now 
knows  about  America  as  the  country  where  M.  Ampere  is  travelling." 


CHAPTER  XXIV. 

1852. 

Before  the  advent  of  the  month  of  April,  which  was  to  see 
Ampere's  academical  arm-chair  kindling  the  pot-fires  of  the 
Revolution,  Ozanam  was  once  more  dangerously  ill.  He  had 
carried  on  his  cours  through  the  winter  witliout  interruption, 
and  with  the  usual  success,  but  towards  Easter  his  strength 
broke  down.  He  was  seized  with  a  pleurisy  which  placed  his 
life  in  immediate  danger.  During  the  course  of  this  illness, 
and  while  he  was  a  prey  to  a  burning  fever,  he  found  strength, 
nevertheless,  inspired  by  his  ardent  faith,  which  might  truly 
now  be  called  the  ruling  passion  strong  in  death,  to  write  the 
following  letter  to  a  friend  whose  faith  had  been  shipwrecked 
in  the  study  of  profane  science.  The  ostensible  pretext  for 
the  letter  was  the  misfortune  of  an  old  schoolfellow  of  theirs 
who  had  been  recently  struck  with  blindness.  Ozanam  in- 
forms M.  H.  that  their  poor  friend  has  no  alternative  but  to 
get  admittance  to  the  Hospital  of  Incurables,  and  that  he 
accepts  his  fate  with  the  most  heroic  resignation : 

"You  have  been  kind  and  generous  to  our  old  comrade,"  adds  the  writer, 
"and  he  is  grateful  and  will  pray  for  you.  And  I,  too,  unworthy  as  I  am,  I 
will  pray  for  you,  since  you  wish  it.  Oh  !  what  touching  memories  that  word 
brings  back  to  me.  The  sweetness  of  that  Christmas  night,  those  conversa- 
tions with  you  and  Lallier  when,  young  and  in  love  with  nothing  but  truth, 
we  conversed  together  on  eternal  things.  Let  me  speak  out,  my  friend .  .  .  . 
Who  knows  ?  Perhaps  the  moment  is  come  to  do  so.  You  have  sought,  in 
the  sincerity  of  your  heart,  to  solve  your  difficulties,  and  you  have  not  suc- 
ceeded ;  but,  my  dear  friend,  the  difficulties  of  religion  are  like  those  of  science 
— there  are  always  some  that  remain.  It  is  a  great  thing  to  settle  a  few  of 
them  ;  no  single  life  would  suffice  to  exhaust  them  all.  To  decide  all  the 
questions  that  may  arise  about  the  Scriptures,  one  should  know  thoroughly  all 
the  Oriental  languatres.  To  answer  all  the  objections  of  Prot'^stants,  one 
would  require  to  study  the  history  of  the  Church  in  its  minutest  details,  or 

273 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  273 

rather  the  universal  history  of  modern  limes.  You  never  could,  therefore, 
occupied  as  you  are  in  other  ways,  answer  all  the  doubts  that  your  active  and 
mgenious  imagination  is  for  ever  evoking:  for  the  g^reater  torment  of  your 
heart  and  mind.  Fortunately  God  has  not  put  certainty  at  such  a  price. 
What,  then,  are  we  to  do  ?  We  are  to  do  in  relig;ion  as  we  do  in  science — 
satisfy  ourselves  of  the  proofs  of  a  g^iven  number  of  truths,  and  then  abandon 
the  rest  to  the  investigation  of  the  learned.  I  believe  irmly  that  the  earth 
goes  round.  I  know,  nevertheless,  that  this  doctrine  has  its  difficulties,  but 
astronomers  explain  them,  and,  if  they  don't  explain  them  all,  the  future  will 
do  the  rest.  So  it  is  with  the  Bible  ;  it  is  beset  with  difficult  questions.  Some 
have  been  solved  long;  ago ;  others,  hitherto  considered  insoluble,  have  been 
answered  in  our  own  day  ;  there  remain  still  many  to  be  solved,  but  God  per- 
mits tliis  to  keep  the  human  mind  on  the  alert,  and  to  exercise  the  activity  of 
future  ages. 

"  No  1  God  cannot  exact  that  religious  truth,  that  is  to  say,  the  essential 
food  of  every  soul,  should  be  the  fruit  of  a  long  research,  impossible  to  the 
great  number  of  the  ignorant,  and  difficult  to  the  most  learned.  Truth  must 
be  within  reach  of  the  lowliest,  and  religion  must  rest  upon  evidence  accessible 
to  the  most  insignificant. 

'*  For  my  own  part,  after  experiencing  many  doubts,  after  having  drenched 
my  pillow  many  and  many  a  night  with  tears  of  despair,  I  rested  my  faith 
upon  an  argument  which  any  mason  or  coal-heaver  may  take  hold  of.  I  said 
to  myself  that  since  every  people  have  a  religion,  good  or  bad,  it  is  clear  that 
religion  is  a  universal,  perpetual,  and,  consequently,  legitimate  want  of  hu- 
manity. God,  who  created  this  want,  has  consequently  pledged  Himself  to 
satisfy  it ;  there  must,  therefore,  be  a  true  reUgion.  Now,  amongst  the 
multitude  of  creeds  that  divide  the  world,  without  going  into  the  study  or 
discussion  of  facts,  who  can  doubt  but  that  Christianity  is  supremely  prefera- 
ble, and  the  only  one  that  leads  man  to  his  moral  destiny  ?  But  again,  in 
Christianity  there  are  three  Churches— the  Protestant,  the  Greek,  and  the 
Catholic — that  is  to  say,  anarchy,  despotism,  and  order.  The  choice  is  not 
difficult,  and  the  truth  of  Catholicism  requires  no  other  demonstration. 

"  This,  my  dear  friend,  is  the  brief  chain  of  reasoning  which  opened  to  me 
the  doors  of  the  faith.  But  once  entered  in,  I  was  suddenly  illuminated  with 
a  new  flood  of  light,  and  much  more  deeply  convinced  of  the  internal  evi- 
dences of  Christianity.  By  this  I  mean  the  daily  experience  which  enables 
me  to  find  in  the  faith  of  my  childhood  all  the  strength  and  light  of  my  ma- 
ture manhood,  the  sanctification  of  my  domestic  joys,  the  solace  of  all  my 
troubles.  If  the  whole  earth  were  to  abjure  Christ,  there  is  in  the  unuttera- 
ble sweetness  of  one  communion,  in  the  sweet  tears  that  it  gives  rise  to,  a 
force  of  conviction  that  would  suffice  to  make  me  cling  to  the  Cross  and  defy 
the  unbelief  of  the  whole  world.  But  I  am  far  from  such  a  trial,  and,  on  the 
contrary,  how  powerful  amongst  men  is  the  action  of  this  faith  in  Christ, 
which  is  represented  as  dead  !  You  do  not  know,  perhaps,  to  what  an  ex- 
tent the  Saviour  of  the  world  is  still  loved,  the  virtues  that  He  still  evokes,  the 
self-sacrifices,  equal  to  the  early  ages  of  the  Church,  that  He  still  inspires  1  I 
need  only  point  to  the  j'oung;  priests  that  I  see  starting  from  the  Seminary  of 


274  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

Foreign  Missions  to  go  and  die  at  Tonquin,  as  St.  Cyprian  and  St.  Irene  did  ; 
to  those  converted  Anglican  ministers  who  give  up  splendid  incomes  to  come 
to  Paris  to  try  and  get  bread  for  their  wives  and  children  by  giving  lessons. 
No !  Catholicism  is  not  bereft  of  heroism  in  the  days  of  Monseigneur  Affre, 
nor  of  eloquence  in  the  days  of  Lacordaire,  nor  of  any  kind  of  glory  or 
authority  in  an  age  which  has  seen  Napoleon,  Royer  CoUard,  and  Chateau- 
briand die  Christians ! 

"  Independently  of  this  internal  evidence,  I  have  been  for  the  last  ten  years 
studying  the  history  of  Christianity,  and  every  step  I  take  in  this  direction 
strengthens  my  convictions.  I  read  the  Fathers,  and  I  am  filled  with  delight 
by  the  moral  beauties  they  unfold  to  me,  the  philosophical  lights  with  which 
they  dazzle  me.  I  plunge  into  the  barbarous  ages,  and  I  see  the  wisdom  of 
the  Church  and  her  magnanimity,  I  do  not  deny  the  disorders  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  but  I  have  convinced  myself  that  Catholic  truth  struggled  single- 
handed  against  the  evil,  and  evolved  out  of  this  chaos  those  prodigies  of  virtue 
and  genius  which  we  admire.  I  am  passionately  enamored  of  the  legitimate 
conquests  of  the  modern  mind ;  I  love  liberty,  and  I  have  served  it,  and  I 
believe  that  it  is  to  the  Gospel  that  we  owe  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity. 
I  have  had  leisure  and  opportunity  to  study  all  these  problems,  and  so  they 
were  made  clear  to  me.  But  I  did  not  want  this ;  and  if  other  duties  had 
hindered  me  from  those  historical  researches  in  which  I  found  such  intense 
interest,  I  should  have  reasoned  about  them  as  I  do  about  exegetical  studies, 
whose  access  is  closed  to  me.  I  believe  in  the  truth  of  Christianity  ;  conse- 
quently, if  there  be  any  objections,  I  believe  that  sooner  or  later  they  will  be 
explained.  I  believe  even  that  some  may  never  be  explained,  because  Christi- 
anity treats  of  the  relations  of  the  finite  with  the  infinite,  and  that  we  shall  never 
understand  the  infinite.  All  that  my  reason  has  a  right  tp  exact  is  that  I  should 
not  compel  it  to  believe  in  the  absurd.  Now,  there  can  be  no  philosophical 
absurdity  in  a  religion  which  satisfied  the  intelligence  of  Descartes  and 
Bossuet,  nor  any  moral  absurdity  in  a  creed  which  sanctified  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul,  nor  any  philological  absurdity  in  an  interpretation  of  Scriptures  which 
satisfied  the  vigorous  mind  of  Sylvestre  de  Sacy.  Certain  men  of  modem 
times  cannot  bear  the  dogma  of  eternal  punishment ;  they  consider  it  in- 
human. Do  they  fancy  they  love  humanity  more,  and  that  they  have  a  finer 
perception  of  the  just  and  the  unjust,  than  St.  Augustine,  St.  Thomas 
Aquinas,  St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  and  St.  Francis  of  Sales  ?  It  is  not  because 
they  love  humanity  more  ;  it  is  because  they  have  a  less  lively  sense  of  the 
horror  of  sin  and  the  justice  of  God  !  Oh  !  my  dear  friend,  let  us  not  waste 
our  time  in  endless  discussions.  We  have  not  two  lives,  one  to  search  out 
the  truth,  and  the  other  to  practise  it.  This  is  why  God  does  not  need  to  be 
searched  after.  He  reveals  Himself  in  this  living  Christian  society  which  sur- 
rounds you  ;  He  is  before  your  eyes ;  He  urges  you.  .  .  .  You  will  soon  be 
forty  years  of  age  ;  it  is  time  you  decided.  Yield  to  the  Saviour,  who  is  en- 
treating you  ;  give  yourself  up  to  Him  as  your  friends  have  done  ;  you  will 
then  find  peace.  Your  doubts  will  vanish  as  mine  vanished.  You  want  so 
little  to  be  an  excellent  Christian  !  you  want  nothing  but  one  act  of  the  will ; 
to  believe  is  to  will.     Will  once  for  all ;  will  at  the  feet  of  a  priest,  who  will 


Life  and  Woiks  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  275 

call  down  the  sanction  of  Heaven  on  your  trembling  act.  Have  but  this 
courage,  my  friend,  and  the  faith  that  you  so  admire  in  poor  L.,  and  which 
supports  him  under  so  great  a  misfortune,  will  add  its  untold  sweetness  to 
your  prosperity." 

The  courage  which  enabled  Ozanam  to  write  this  long 
appeal  from  his  sick-bed  was  soon  after  rewarded ;  before  he 
died  he  had  the  happiness  of  knowing  that  his  friend  had  re- 
turned to  the  faith. 

The  most  grievous  trial  of  illness  to  Ozanam  was  the  inac- 
tivity which  it  enforced.  He  had  continued  to  lecture  regu- 
larly at  the  Sorbonne  long  after  he  should  have  ceased  in 
sheer  mercy  to  himself;  but  to  the  medical  men  and  friends 
who  entreated  him  to  give  it  up,  he  would  reply,  "  I  must  do 
my  day's  work  "  :  "  //  faut  (aire  ma  jourtider  He  continued 
to  do  it  as  long  as  he  coaUl  gather  up  a  remnant  of  strength 
to  drag  himself  to  his  chair.  But  the  day  was  spent  now, 
and  the  faithful  laborer  was  soon  to  receive  his  reward. 

He  was  still  confined  to  his  bed,  suffering  great  pain,  and 
consumed  with  fever,  when  one  day  he  heard  that  the  public 
were  clamoring  for  him  at  the  Sorbonne,  accusing  him  of 
self-indulgence  and  neglect  of  duty  in  being  so  long  absent 
from  his  courSy  when  he  was  paid  by  the  State  for  giving  it. 
The  news  stung  him  to  the  quick.  "  I  will  show  them  it  is 
not  true.  I  will  do  honor  to  my  profession  !  "  he  cried.  And, 
in  spite  of  the  tears  of  his  wife  and  the  entreaties  of  his 
brother  and  another  medical  attendant,  he  had  himself 
dressed  and  drove  straight  to  the  Sorbonne,  where  he  found 
the  crowd  still  collected  outside  his  class.  When  the  Professor, 
leaning  on  the  arm  of  a  friend,  pale,  worn,  more  Jike  a  spectre 
than  a  living  man,  advanced  through  their  midst,  the  rioters 
were  smitten  with  horror  and  remorse;  as  he  ascended  the 
chair  that  had  witnessed  so  many  of  his  triumphs,  and  that  he 
was  never  to  ascend  again,  their  applause  broke  forth,  rising 
and  falling  like  waves  around  him.  He  stood  for  some 
minutes  gazing  in  silence  on  the  thoughtless,  cruel  young 
crowd,  his  black,  dazzling  eyes  shining  with  the  terrible  light 


276  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

of  fever,  his  long  hair  hanging,  his  whole  appearance  that  of 
a  man  who  was  nearer  to  death  than  to  Xi^q.  When  at  last 
the  tumult  subsided,  he  spoke.  His  voice  rang  out  as  clear 
as  silver,  more  piercing  from  its  very  weakness,  like  a  spirit 
imprisoned  in  a  body  too  frail  to  bear  the  shock  of  its  inspira- 
tion. 

"Gentlemen,"  he  said,  "our  age  is  accused  of  being  an  age  of  egotism; 
we  professors,  it  is  said,  are  tainted  with  the  general  epidemic  ;  and  yet  it  is 
here  that  we  use  up  our  health  ;  it  is  here  that  we  wear  ourselves  out.  I  do 
not  complain  of  it ;  our  life  belongs  to  you  ;  we  owe  it  to  you  to  our  last 
breath,  and  you  shall  have  it.  For  my  part,  if  I  die  it  will  be  in  your  ser- 
vice !" 

He  said  truly ;  this  last  effort  killed  him.  He  gave  the 
lecture,  speaking  with  an  eloquence  and  power  that  startled 
those  who  had  heard  him  in  his  palmiest  days.  The  enthu- 
siasm of  the  audience  rose  at  last  to  frenzy.  Perhaps  they  felt 
instinctively  that  human  speech  could  go  no  higher,  and  that, 
having  now  reached  its  apogee  in  Ozanam,  they  would  never 
hear  his  voice  again.  As  he  left  the  lecture-hall  friends  gath- 
ered round  him  in  delighted  congratulation,  and  one  pressing 
his  hand,  exclaimed,  "  You  were  wonderful  to-day !" 

"  Yes,"  replied  Ozanam,  with  a  smile,  "  but  now  the  ques- 
tion is,  how  to  get  some  sleep  to-night."     And  he  got  none. 

The  next  day  his  brother  came,  and,  sitting  by  the  sick 
man's  bed,  discovered,  to  his  horror,  that  there  was  a  princi- 
ple of  decomposition  in  the  blood.  *'  He  may  be  dead  in 
ten  days!"  he  said  in  a  whisper  to  his  eldest  brother. 

As  soon  as  it  was  possible  for  him  to  be  moved  he  was 
taken  to  Eaux-Bonnes,  in  hopes  that  the  waters  might  arrest, 
at  least  for  a  time,  the  fatal  progress  of  the  disease.  But  the 
hope  was  vain.  He  gained  sufficient  strength,  however,  to 
enjoy  the  wild  beauties  of  the  scenery,  to  walk  out  every  day, 
and  even  "  to  climb  up  the  rocks  after  the  goats  by  way  of 
digesting  these  tumblerfuls  of  sulphurous  water  which  I  am 
condemned  to  swallow  between  two  mountains,"  he  says  to 
M.  de  la  ViUemarqu6;  and  adds,  "I  have  all  my  clan  with 


Ufe  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  277 

me,  and  when  we  shall  have  decamped  from  these  altitudes, 
we  go  on  to  Biarritz  for  sea-bathing ;  and  after  that  I  am 
condemned  to  exile  in  the  south  for  the  winter." 

He  derived  so  much  benefit  from  the  waters  after  a  short 
time,  that  it  at  once  struck  him  what  a  boon  it  would  be  to 
the  poor,  attacked  with  his  own  malady,  if  they  could  come 
to  Eaux-Bonnes ;  and  he  forthwith  set  to  work  on  a  scheme 
of  building  or  hiring  a  hospital,  and  creating  a  fund,  through 
the  generosity  and  exertions  of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul,  which  should  serve  to  defray  the  travelling  expenses  of 
the  invalids.  He  was  not  spared  to  carry  out  the  plan,  but 
we  understand  that  it  has  been  revived  of  late,  and  is  likely 
to  be  realized.  Meantime  Ozanam  took  advantage  of  his 
sojourn  at  Eaux-Bonnes  to  found  a  Conference.  Another 
consolation  was  granted  him  in  the  society  of  that  beautiful 
kindred  soul,  the  Abb6  Perreyve,  who,  like  him  whom  he 
called  his  "  Master,"  was  stricken  by  the  hand  of  death,  and 
had  come  to  seek  relief  in  the  salutary  waters.  P^re  Lacor- 
daire  has  quoted  the  pages,  full  of  pathetic  beauty,  where  the 
young  priest  recalls  these  days  of  sweet  and  tender  intercourse, 
when  the  two  friends  wandered  over  the  hills  together,  some- 
times in  silent  soul-communion,  listening  to  the  song  of  birds 
and  the  music  of  falling  waters,  sometimes  conversing  on 
things  human  and  Divine — on  God,  on  Nature,  on  the  life 
beyond,  to  which  they  were  approaching. 

"  When  the  sky  was  clear,"  says  the  Abbe  Perreyve,  •*  we  would  start  early, 
making  our  way  to  one  of  those  pleasant  walks  round  Eaux-Bonnes,  and  the 
remembrance  of  which  is  beautified  to  nie  now  by  that  of  his  dear  presence. 
We  often  chose  the  Horizontal  Promenade.  There  we  enjoyed  the  evening 
calm,  and  we  came  away  when  the  sun,  forsaking  the  purple  heights  of  the 
Pic  du  Gers,  sent  the  fresh  vapors  of  the  valley  of  Laruns  floating  up  to  us. 
When  at  the  end  of  our  walk  we  caught  sight  of  the  house-tops  of  Eaux- 
Bonnes  it  was  nightfall ;  the  hills  stood  out  in  sharp  and  sombre  lines  against 
the  still  luminous  sky  ;  the  moon,  emerging  from  the  firs  of  the  highest  rocks, 
rose  silently,  and  breathings,  regular  as  the  slumbers  of  a  child,  lulled  the 
woods  softly.  At  this  hour,  in  this  lovely  spot,  our  souls  ascended  naturally 
to  God.  We  still  conversed,  but  long  intervals  of  silence  seemed  to  warn  us 
that  it  was  the  hour  rather  for  prayer — that  deep,  unspoken  prayer  that  words 


27 S  Life  aftd  Works  oj  Frederic  Ozanam. 

cannot  articulate,  and  which  consists  only  in  being  silent  before  God.     O  my 
Lord  !  O  my  Master  !  I  thank  Thee  for  having  granted  me  those  hours." 

Ozanam  too  gave  thanks  for  them.  Indeed,  it  may  be 
said  with  truth  that  few  men  were  ever  more  diHgent  in 
thanksgiving  than  he  was.  "  God  evidently  saw  fit  to  give 
me  a  few  days  longer,  in  order  that  I  might  become  better  : 
may  He  be  blessed  for  it !"  he  exclaims;  "  but  is  it  His  pur- 
pose to  restore  my  health,  or  to  make  me  expiate  my  sins  by 
long  sufferings  ?  I  know  nothing,  except  that  I  bless  Him  ! 
May  He  only  grant  me  courage;  let  Him  send  me  the  suf- 
fering that  purifies ;  and  if  I  must  carry  a  cross,  may  it  be 
that  of  the  penitent  thief!"  Yet  he  was  far  from  being  with- 
out hope  of  his  recovery,  although  his  chief  aim  was  to  ob- 
tain perfect  resignation  to  renounce  it.  He  left  Eaux-Bonnes 
in  September,  and  writes  from  Biarritz  soon  after  his  arrival 
there : 

"It  would  be  great  ingratitude  towards  Divine  Providence  not  to  hope.  If 
my  convalescence  does  not  advance  as  rapidly  as  I  might  wish,  it  has  allowed 
me  to  make  a  pretty  little  tour  in  the  Pyrenees  with  my  wife.  We  visited, 
with  great  enjoyment,  these  mountains,  which,  if  they  have  not  the  stern 
;T-andeur  of  the  Alps,  are  not  wanting  in  a  majesty  of  their  own,  tempered  by 
a  peculiar  grace.  We  must  not  look  for  many  glaciers,  and  the  eternal  snows 
only  cover  a  few  peaks  ;  but  one  is  never  tired  admiring  the  beauty  of  the 
lights  upon  the  rocks,  the  graceful  curve  of  the  crests  ;  above  all,  the  limpid, 
noisy  waters  that  bound  along  on  every  side.  Even  the  Alps  themselves  have 
nothing  to  compare  with  the  circus  of  Savernia.  Picture  to  yourself,  not  a 
circus,  but  rather  the  vault  of  a  cathedral,  eighteen  hundred  feet  high,  covered 
with  snow,  furrowed  with  cascades,  whose  white  foam  boils  over  rocks  of  the 
most  glowing  colors  ;  the  walls  are,  as  it  were,  hewn  perpendicularly  ;  when 
the  clouds  float  above  them,  they  look  like  the  draperies  of  the  sanctuary  ;  and 
"if  the  sun  shines,  the  radiant  torch  is  not  too  brilliant  to  illuminate  an  edifice 
that  one  would  fancy  had  been  commenced  by  the  angels,  and  interrupted  by 
some  fault  of  man's." 

He  was  delighted  with  the  population  of  the  mountains, 
with  their  antique  faith  and  traditions,  and  their  picturesque 
costumes  that  seem  a  guarantee  for  the  primitive  simplicity 
of  their  manners.  "  How,"  he  asks,  "  can  we  impute  our 
modern  corruption  to  these  peasants  who  have  preserved  the 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  279 

little  Basque  cap  of  their  faiiiers,  wiih  hair  falling  to  their 
shoulders,  and  a  scarlet  vest  set  off  by  a  beautiful  white  waist- 
coat, a  belt,  short  breeches,  and  gaiters  ?  " 

They  made  a  pilgrimage  to  Betharram,  a  shrine  of  the  fif- 
teenth century,  still  much  frequented,  and  where  Our  Lady  is 
venerated  under  the  tide  of  Notre  Dame  au  Rameau  d'or.  A 
golden  branch  was  offered  as  an  ex  veto  by  a  young  girl  who, 
having  fallen  into  the  neighboring  torrent,  made  a  vow  to 
Our  Lady,  and  at  the  same  moment  found  under  her  hand  a 
branch,  to  which  she  clung.  "  I  too,"  exclaims  Ozanam, 
"  am  clinging  with  all  my  might  to  the  saving  branch,  to  her 
whom  we  call  the  comfort  of  the  afflicted  and  the  refuge  of 
sinners." 

The  Abb6  Perreyve  had  gone  on  with  Ozanam  to  Biarritz 
after  the  usual  season  at  Eaux- Bonnes;  but  his  cure  being 
considered  sufficiently  complete,  he  was  allowed  to  return  to 
Paris,  after  some  weeks  of  sea-air.  Tlie  parting  was  a  solemn 
one.  Ozanam  insisted  on  accompanying  his  friend  as  far  as 
Bayonne,  where  the  stage-coach  awaited  the  traveller. 

*♦  It  is  an  hour's  drive  from  Biarritz  to  Bayonne,"  says  the  Abbe  Perreyve, 
continuing  his  short  narrative  ;  •'  this  hour  was  the  last  I  was  ever  to  spend  with 
him  on  earth.  God  permitted  him  to  have  the  presentiment  of  it.  He  con- 
versed on  the  way  upon  grave  subjects  concerning  himself  and  me,  and  rela- 
tive to  general  affairs,  the  state  of  the  Church,  the  conduct  we  should  observe 
in  the  present  circumstances,  and  the  hopes  which  the  future  held  out.  He 
spoke  as  if  it  were  for  the  last  time,  and  I  listened  religiously. 

"  When  we  reached  the  high-road  of  Spain,  that  point  where  the  towers  of 
the  cathedral  of  Bayonne  became  visible  in  the  distance,  he  changed  his  tone  ; 
he  told  me  he  knew  the  hand  of  death  was  upon  him,  and  that  we  should 
doubtless  never  meet  again. 

"  I  sliared  all  these  fears,  only  with  more  hopefulness — that  is  to  say,  with 
more  illusions — and  I  honestly  tried  to  combat  his  sad  forebodings.  But  he  was 
not  to  be  shaken  ;  he  spoke  to  me  of  his  approaching  death  with  an  assurance 
that  bore  down  all  my  motives  of  hope  ;  and  when  our  carriage  drew  up  before 
the  coach  that  was  to  take  me  on  to  Paris,  he  grasped  my  hand  in  a  long 
pressure.  We  alighted.  I  h.ad  barely  time  to  get  my  little  luggage  secured 
in  its  place,  and  to  settle  about  the  fare,  when  it  was  time  to  part.  He  em- 
braced me  fervently,  and  said,  *  Henri,  bid  me  a  good  farewell.'  I  felt  my 
heart  breaking,  but  not  a  tear  came.  I  followed  him  with  my  eyes  as  long  as 
that  consolation  was  possible  ;  at  last  a  turn  in  the  road  suddenly  hid  him 
from  me,  and  I  never  saw  him  again. 


28o  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

"  It  was  towards  evening.  When  we  reached  the  top  of  the  hill  that  over- 
looks Bayonne,  the  sun  was  sinking  into  the  shining  waves  of  the  sea,  a 
mantle  of  purple  and  gold  encircled  all  the  landscape,  the  sands  of  Biarritz 
sparkled  in  the  distance  through  a  mist  of  fire,  an  artificial  flame  marked 
where  the  lighthouse  stood,  and  our  eyes  were  riveted  on  this  signal,  lost  in  an 
ocean  of  light.  The  spectacle,  far  from  dispelling  my  sadness,  expanded  it,  as 
it  were,  to  the  infinite.  Through  this  glorious  revelation  of  light,  of  love,  of 
beauty,  I  saw,  at  one  glance,  all  the  happy  days  of  which  this  evening  was  the 
decline,  and,  regret  bringing  me  back  to  him  to  whom  I  owed  its  charm,  I  be- 
held him  as  a  friend  lost  to  me  for  ever.  I  was  grieved  not  to  have  shown  him 
more  affection  ;  I  spoke  to  him  ;  I  greeted  him  from  afar  ;  I  swore  to  be  eter- 
nally faithful  to  him  ;  but  the  future  held  out  no  promise  of  consolation  to 
me.  I  heard  his  voice  still  bidding  me  '  Farewell  ! '  I  fell  into  a  sadness  so 
deep  that  my  soul  was  for  a  time  submerged  in  it." 

Yet  even  after  this  supreme  farewell  Ozanam  was  not  with- 
out his  intervals  of  hope.  He  spoke  cheerfully  of  the  benefit 
his  health  had  derived  from  the  sea-bathing  and  lovely 
climate  of  Biarritz,  and  alluded  to  his  recovery  "being  pro- 
bably postponed  till  next  summer,"  always  adding  the  pro- 
viso, "  that  is,  if  God  wills  that  I  should  recover  at  all." 

Idleness,  inaction,  and  the  separation  from  his  friends  were 
still  his  heaviest  trial ;  but  when  a  word  of  complaint  escapes 
him  he  quickly  retracts  it,  and  enumerates  his  many  reasons 
for  thankfulness.  "  I  am  ungrateful,"  he  says  to  Lallier ;  "  I 
have  the  great  happiness  of  seeing  my  wife  and  child  in 
blooming  health,  of  being  able  to  enjoy  their  society.  I  am 
able  to  devote  myself  to  the  education  of  my  little  Marie  with 
a  leisure  that  I  never  knew  formerly.  I  ought  to  be  happy 
and  bless  the  great  mercy  of  Providence;  and  yet  I  am  de- 
pressed; I  need  your  prayers  more  than  ever."  The  arrival 
of  his  brother  Charles,  who  had  broken  away  from  his  practice 
in  Paris  to  come  and  take  care  of  him,  was  a  new  and  great 
cause  of  thankfulness  to  the  invalid.  "  He  arrived  the  other 
day  in  a  torrent  of  rain,  this  dear  brother,  like  a  rainbow — a 
symbol  of  the  hope  he  has  brought  to  us.  After  examining, 
thumping,  feeling,  and  sounding  me,  he  declares  that  Eaux- 
Bonnes  has  done  wonders,  and  that  I  am  well !  How  can  I, 
in  the  face  of  this  verdict,  permit  myself  to  catch  the  shadow 
of  cold  or  fever  ?  " 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  281 

The  important  question  now  was,  where  he  was  to  pass  the 
winter.  His  name  had  been  proposed  as  a  member  for  the 
Institute  and  he  had  been  extremely  anxious  to  return  to  Paris 
in  November,  if  it  were  possible,  in  order  to  take  personal 
steps  for  the  success  of  his  candidature,  but  before  November 
had  come  the  impossibility  of  this  plan  was  made  palpable.  It 
was  now  a  choice  between  remaining  on  at  Bayonne  or  pass- 
ing into  Spain,  where  the  climate  was  warmer  and  drier.  This 
latter  alternative  attracted  Ozanam,  as  it  held  out  the  prospect 
of  a  new  country  in  which  he  was  much  interested,  and  with 
whose  language  he  was  already  tolerably  familiar.  Against 
this  had  to  be  balanced  the  fatigue  of  travelling  in  his  present 
exhausted  state.  "  But  the  worst  of  all  fatigues  is  doing 
nothing,"  he  declares.  "  It  is  true,  I  am  too  well  surrounded 
for  my  heart  to  be  in  want  of  occupation,  but  my  mind  needs  it 
sadly.  When  I  come  to  the  end  of  my  day  without  having 
done  anything,  this  idleness  weighs  on  me  like  a  remorse,  and 
it  seems  to  me  that  I  deserve  neither  the  bread  that  I  eat  nor 
the  bed  I  he  down  on." 

Travelling  had  been  his  passion  all  his  life,  and  he  longed 
to  seize  the  present  opportunity,  persuaded  that  the  moral 
and  intellectual  enjoyment  must  compensate  for  whatever 
bodily  fatigue  the  journey  would  involve. 

"Alas  !  in  the  presumptuous  days  of  my  youth,"  he  says,  *'  I  spurned  the 
sacred  isle  of  Ceres.  My  desires  extended  on  one  side  to  the  Columns  of  Her- 
cules, and  on  the  other  to  the  shores  of  Palestine.  How  often  have  I  embarked 
for  the  Holy  Land,  seated  by  the  fireside  with  Madame  Ozanam,  tongas  in 
hand,  and  turning  over  a  half-burned  log!  And  here  I  am  now  at  Bayonne, 
a  town  half-Spanish,  where  most  of  the  signboards  over  the  shops  speak  the 
purest  Castilian,  and  I  am  hesitating  about  pushing  on  to  Seville  !  " 

He  broke  loose  one  day  and  set  off  with  his  wife  on  a  little 
excursion  into  Spain,  which  he  enjoyed  immensely,  but  paid 
for  by  some  weeks  of  more  enforced  and  absolute  repose  than 
ever.  He  contended,  however,  that  the  pleasure  had  not 
been  too  dearly  bought ;  that  he  had  garnered  a  stock  of 
poetry,  beauty,  and  delight,  to  feed  his  imagination  for  a 
month. 


282  Life  and  Works  oj  Frederic  Ozanam. 

"  In  former  journeys  my  mind  was  distracted  by  the  works  of  man.  In  this 
land,  where  man  has  done  little,  I  see  only  the  works  of  God,  and  I  now  say, 
with  all  the  mi^jht  of  my  faith,  God  is  not  only  the  great  Geometer,  the  great 
Legislator,  He  is  also  the  great,  the  supreme  Artist.  He  is  the  Author  of  all 
poetry  ;  He  has  poured  it  over  creation  in  floods  ;  and  if  He  wished  the  world 
to  be  good,  He  also  meant  it  to  be  beautiful.  .  .  .  Yes,  one  is  possessed  by  a 
sense  of  moral  purity  on  those  heights  which  the  foot  of  man  rarely  sullies,  by 
the  brink  of  those  cascades  where  none  but  the  chamois  comes  to  quench  his 
thirst,  in  the  midst  of  those  wildernesses  where  the  flowers  open  their  cups 
only  to  perfume  the  soUtude  of  the  Most  High.  David  had  stood  upon  the 
heights  of  Lebanon  when  he  cried  out,  Mirabilis  m  altis  Dominus!  He  had 
beheld  the  ocean  when  he  exclaimed,  Mirabiles  elationes  maris! 

*'  We,  too,  we  have  stood  here  by  the  seashore,  and  we  are  never  wearied 
of  the  grand  spectacle  it  displays  to  us  daily.  We  all  know  that  the  ocean  is 
full  of  grandeur  and  majesty,  but  it  is  only  when  we  come  near  to  it  that  we 
learn  how  full  of  grace  it  is.  We  are  just  come  back,  my  wife  and  I,  from 
witnessing  a  sunset.  The  great  star  was  about  to  disappear  behind  the  hills 
of  Spain,  whose  bold  outlines  we  can  see  from  hence  standing  out  against  a 
perfectly  beautiful  sky.  The  mountains  dipped  their  feet  into  a  luminous 
golden  mist  that  floats  above  the  sea  ;  the  rays  followed  one  another  in  chang- 
ing colors,  now  green,  now  azure,  sometimes  tinted  with  pink  and  lilac  ;  then 
they  fainted  away  upon  the  sandy  beach,  or  else  broke  against  the  rocks  that  are 
white  with  foam.  The  wave,  travelling  in  from  afar,  rose  against  the  cliffs 
and  danced  over  them  in  sheafs  of  spray  with  all  the  fantastic  grace  of  those 
artificial  waters  that  play  in  the  gardens  of  kings.  But  here,  in  the  domain  of 
God,  the  play  is  eternal.  Every  day  it  recommences,  and  every  day  it  varies 
according  to  the  power  of  the  wind  and  the  fulness  of  the  tide." 

It  was  finally  decided  that  they  should  venture  into  Spain, 
and,  if  the  first  essay  proved  favorable,  pass  the  winter  there. 
Ozanam  had  a  great  desire  to  visit  the  tomb  of  St.  James  at 
Compostella,  but  the  cold  was  so  severe  that  he  was  obliged 
to  renounce  this  plan,  and,  after  sojourning  a  few  days  at 
Burgos,  retraced  his  steps  to  Bayonne. 

The  disappointment  was  the  greater,  from  the  beginning 
having  promised  so  well.  On  the  evening  of  his  arrival  at 
Burgos  he  writes  to  his  brother  Charles,  who  had  left  him  and 
returned  to  Paris : 

"  It  would  seem  up  to  this  that  I  have  done  well  in  coming,  and  that  God 
has  blessed  our  good  intentions.  We  have  had,  nevertheless,  thirty-three 
hours'  journey,  mountains  to  traverse,  second-rate  inns,  and  the  rain  into  the 
bargain,  which  caught  us  on  the  way.  With  all  this  I  have  not  taken  cold, 
and  I  am  not  suffering.     At  three  o'clock  this  afternoon  we  made  our  entry 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  283 

into  this  ancient  capital,  which  calls  itself  the  mother  of  king;s  and  restorer  of 
kingdoms — madre  de  reyes^  y  restauradura  de  regnos."^ 

The  next  day  he  set  out  to  explore  the  old  town,  his  first 
visit  being  for  the  cathedral,  where  he  spent  three  delightful 
hours.  "  But  on  coming  out,"  he  says,  at  the  close  of  an  en- 
thusiastic description  of  the  magnificent  edifice — "a  work  not 
of  giants  but  of  angels  " — "  we  found  such  torrents  of  rain, 
such  a  furious  wind,  and  streets  rendered  so  impracticable  by 
both,  that  we  had  to  give  up  all  idea  of  further  sight-seeing 
that  day." 

He  contrived,  however,  when  it  cleared  off  for  a  short 
interval,  "  to  salute  the  place  where  the  house  of  the  Cid  had 
stood,  the  ark  of  Fernan  Gonzalez,  the  famous  Count  of 
Castile,"  and  to  pay  a  visit  to  the  house  of  a  lady,  where  they 
met  one  of  the  founders  of  a  Conference  of  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul  at  Burgos. 

In  spite  of  "  the  abominable  weather,  which  lasted  three 
whole  days,  and  of  the  inclement  cold,  and  the  stupidity  of 
the  inhabitants,  who  have  not  the  faintest  notion  of  warming 
their  houses,"  the  invalid  escaped  all  unpleasant  consequen- 
ces, and  was  in  high  spirits  with  his  expedition. 

♦'  I  am  very  glad  to  have  made  this  pilgrimage,"  he  assures  his  brother ;  *•  it 
has  perfonned  more  even  than  it  promised,  and  will  throw  a  flood  of  light  on 
my  studies,  if  God  permits  me  to  resume  them.  In  this  way  my  year  of  idle- 
ness will  not  have  been  quite  lost.  I  employed  my  autumn  as  much  as  I  could 
in  studying  Spain  in  the  middle  ages ;  but  it  was  hard  to  form  an  accurate  idea 
of  a  country  I  had  not  seen.  The  chief  theatre  of  Spain  in  the  middle  ages  is 
Burgos,  the  scene  of  the  greater  number  of  those  heroic  exploits  celebrated  in 
the  popular  ballads.  Elsewhere  I  should  have  seen  episodes ;  here  I  had  the 
poem  itself.  It  is,  no  doubt,  after  all,  only  tradition  and  memories,  and  the 
pleasure  of  saying  to  one's  self,  /  have  seen  tlie  spot.  But  then  there  are  the 
monuments ;  the  admirable  basilica  I  have  described,  .  .  .  and  finally,  two 
gjand  monasteries  that  we  were  going  off  to  see  when  I  interrupted  my  letter. 
The  first  is  that  of  Las  Huelgas,  a  convent  of  noble  gentlewomen,  founded  by 
Alphonsus  VIII.  in  1185,  .  .  .  The  second  is  the  monastery  of  Trappists 
(Chartreux),  erected  by  Isabella  the  Great,  in  memory  of  her  father,  King  John 
II.  .  .  .  Here  I  found  the  apogee  of  Castilian  art,  when  Spain  still  lived  on 
her  native  genius,  before  she  was  aggrandized  and  saddened,  and  soon  after 
oppressed  by  the  Austrian  dynasty.  In  a  sojourn  of  three  days  I  passed  in  re- 
view  three  centuries  of  history.     How  grateful  I  should  be  to  God  for  giving 


284  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

me  strength  to  undertake  this  journey,  and  to  you,  my  dear  brother,  whose 
care  prepared  me  for  it,  and  to  my  Amehe,  who  has  had  all  the  anxiety  of  it." 

Tlie  souvenir  of  this  rapid  excursion  remains  to  us  in  that 
lovely  piece  of  picturesque  writing  entitled  "  A  Pilgrimage  to 
the  Land  of  the  Cid,"  The  grace  and  freshness  of  the  open- 
ing pagCj  where  the  pilgrim  bewails  his  inability  to  accom- 
plish his  journey  to  the  desired  goal,  have  seldom  been  sur- 
passed : 

*'  It  used  to  be  a  favorite  devotion  of  our  fathers  to  go  in  pilgrimage  to  St. 
James  of  Compostella.  .  .  .  Before  returning  to  their  own  country,  these 
pious  pilgrims  would  visit  the  beach  where,  as  the  legend  says,  the  body  of  the 
apostle  was  cast  by  the  waves ;  here  they  would  gather  quantities  of  shells, 
with  which  they  ornamented  their  head-gear  and  their  mantles  ;  some  they 
took  home  to  their  children,  and  in  the  long  winter's  evenings  these  were 
handed  round  by  neighbors  and  friends  sitting  by  the  hearth.  I,  too,  dreamed 
of  a  pilgrimage  to  St.  James,  .  .  .  but  a  will  which  overrules  ours  anested  me 
at  the  first  stage,  and  brought  my  pilgrimage  to  an  end,  not  at  the  tomb  of  the 
apostle,  but  in  the  land  of  the  Cid,  And  so  I  have  come  home  with  my  hands 
void  of  shells,  but  full  of  those  fluttering  leaves  on  which  the  traveller  notes 
down  his  impressions  by  the  way,  intending  to  complete  them  later.  This  is 
all  I  have  to  offer  to  my  friends,  to  my  neighbors— those  who  share  with  me 
that  neighborhood  of  the  mind  and  heart  which  unites  so  many  Christians  in 
our  day,  and  induces  them  to  prolong  the  vigil,  watching  in  hope  together, 
notwithstanding  the  badness  of  the  nights." 

After  glancing  rapidly  at  the  country  and  the  populations 
through  which  he  hurries,  Ozanam  stops  to  consider  Burgos 
under  three  separate  aspects — as  a  city  of  heroes,  of  kings, 
and  as  the  city  of  the  Virgin  Mother.  The  shadow  of  the 
mighty  Cid  hovers  over  him  at  every  step  through  the  city  of 
heroes,  in  the  castle  where  his  marriage  with  Chim^ne  was 
celebrated,  in  the  church  where  he  challenged  Alphonsus  IV., 
and  compelled  him  to  deny  on  his  oath  that  he  had  any 
share  in  the  murder  of  his  brother ;  he  shows  us  suspended 
from  the  roof  of  this  church  the  famous  box  which  the  bril- 
liant Cid  filled  with  sand,  and  then  pledged  to  two  Jews  for  a 
huge  sum  of  gold,  alleging  that  it  was  filled  with  precious 
gems.  He  leads  us  to  the  warrior's  tomb,  where,  laid  side 
by  side  in  one  coffin,  he  and  his  Chim^ne  rest,  "  not  parted 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  285 

in  death."  For  two  reals  a  valet  draws  aside  the  pall,  and 
opens  the  coffin  for  the  inspection  of  the  curious  traveller. 

Ozanam  shuddered  as  he  offered  the  coin  which  paid  for 
this  irreverence.  "  There  is  always  something  horrible  in  the 
violation  of  the  secret  of  the  grave ;  I  cannot  bear  the  sight 
of  those  withered  bones,  unless  sanctity  has  clothed  them 
with  an  imperishable  garment." 

But  the  narrator  does  not  dwell  exclusively  on  heroic  or 
sacred  subjects.  He  is  alive  to  every  humorous  character- 
istic and  incident  of  the  places  and  the  people  through  which 
he  passes. 

*'  Let  not  my  friends  imagine,"  he  says,  "  that  I  found  no  better  lodg:ing  and 
fare  in  the  land  of  the  Cid  than  he  and  his  companions  when  they  encamped 
on  the  dreary  shore  of  Arlanzon.  I  must  avenge  this  fair  and  much  maligned 
country.  ...  If  the  lodging  is  at  best  but  mediocre,  the  kitchens  are  still 
heroic.  Never  did  I  behold  suspended  from  a  ceiling  such  an  imposing  array 
of  dripping-pans,  sauce-pans,  and  kettles.  I  gazed  above  all  on  those  long 
files  of  pots,  which  reminded  me — forgive  the  Homeric  reminiscence — of  the 
long  file  of  Penelope's  servants  whom  Telemachus  hung  up  on  the  same  rope 
in  chastisement  of  their  perfidy.  The  huge  patriarchal  chimney-piece  projects 
into  the  middle  of  the  room,  and  beneath  its  shelter  the  traveller  finds  a  warm 
comer,  without  fear  of  scandalizing  the  beehive  of  cooks,  accustomed  to  the 
blessed  familiarity  of  Spanish  manners.  Here  his  eye  may  rest  lovingly  on  the 
tempting  fried  eggs,  the  partridges  gilding  themselves  before  the  fire,  and  the 
brown  chocolate  foaming  in  the  bowl.  If  your  abstemiousness  is  satisfied  with 
this,  if  you  don't  recoil  from  the  smell  of  the  leathern  flask  which  testifies  to 
the  authenticity  of  that  bottle  of  Malaga,  if  you  have  not  the  dangerous 
curiosity  to  taste  those  suspicious-looking  pease,  swimming  in  tlie  neighboring 
pot,  or  those  meats  basted  with  rancid  oil — rest  assured  ;  we  shall  live.  W'e 
shall  live,  and  you  will  bear  me  no  malice  for  having  come  down  from  my 
p>oetic  heights  to  these  prosaic  realities.  They  have  not,  in  truth,  turned  us 
aside  from  Spanish  literature  ;  for  if  the  poem  of  the  Cid  had  its  birth  on  the 
battle-field,  it  was  from  the  kitchen  of  an  inn  that  Don  Quixote  sallied  forth 
as  a  knight  to  fight  the  giants  and  avenge  all  wrongs.; 

The  traveller  introduces  us  to  another  sprightly  scene,  a 
tennis-court  in  the  Basque  country,  where  we  see  the  elders 
seated  on  the  bench  of  judges  solemnly  watching  the  game, 
while,  close  at  hand,  that  faithful  counsellor  of  contested 
causes,  the  bottle,  stands  cool  and  convenient  in  a  hole  in 
the  wall.      The  spectacle  cf  a  bull-fight  would  of  course 


286  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

have  been  an  inevitable  duty  for  the  stranger  passing  through 
the  city  of  kings,  but  Ozanam  confesses  that  he  was  thankful 
to  escape  it,  the  season  for  that  national  entertainment  being 
over.  The  Fkiza  Mayor  of  Burgos,  with  its  graceful  porticos 
and  symmetrical  rows  of  windows,  was  not  now  a  sanguinary 
amphitheatre,  but  a  beautiful  square,  whose  lists  were  only 
crossed  by  dark-eyed  women  going  to  draw  water  from  the 
fountain,  bearing  their  vessels  erect  on  their  head  and  singing 
joyous  snatches  as  they  went.  He  takes  leave  of  the  city  by 
a  poetic  invocation  to  Notre  Dame  de  Burgos : 

"The  moment  is  come  to  take  leave  of  these  lovely  scenes,  which  I  shall 
never  behold  again,  and  to  whom  I  leave  a  portion  of  my  affections  and 
regrets,  as  to  so  many  other  ancient  towns,  mountains,  and  shores.  There  is 
somewhere  in  Sicily  a  group  of  broken  columns  overshadowed  by  an  olive- 
grove  ;  in  Rome  there  is  a  chapel  in  the  catacombs ;  in  the  Pyrenees  there  is  a 
shrine  beside  which  the  limpid  waters  run  beneath  an  ivy-mantled  bridge ; 
there  is  in  Brittany  a  melancholy  beech,  to  which  my  thoughts  return  with  an 
indescribable  charm,  above  all  when  the  present  hour  is  gloomy  and  the  future 
uncertain,  I  will  add  Burgos  to  these  pilgrimages  of  memory,  which  console 
me  sometimes  in  the  painful  pilgrimage  of  life.  Suffer  me  then  to  cast  one 
long  farewell  glance  on  the  grand  Cathedral ;  let  me  kneel  once  more  within 
the  radiant  sanctuary,  before  the  Virgin  of  the  altar-piece,  and  if  the  prayer  of 
a  Catholic  scandalizes  you,  hearken  not  to  it :  O  Our  Lady  of  Burgos,  .  .  . 
Queen  of  all  Catholic  cities ;  yes,  truly,  thou  art  'all  beautiful  and  gracious,' 
pulchra  es  et  decora^  since  the  sole  thought  of  thee  drew  down  grace  and 
beauty  into  these  works  of  man.  Barbarians  rushed  forth  from  their  forests, 
and  seemed  like  incendiaries  made  only  to  destroy.  But  thou  didst  render 
them  so  gentle  that  they  bowed  their  heads,  and  yoked  themselves  to  chariots 
heavily  laden,  and  became  obedient  to  masters  to  erect  churches  to  thy  name. 
Thou  didst  render  them  so  patient  that  they  did  not  count  the  centuries 
spent  in  chiselling  superb  porticos,  galleries,  and  spires  for  thee.  Thou  didst 
render  them  so  bold  that  their  basilicas  soared  in  height  far  beyond  the  loftiest 
monuments  of  the  Romans,  and  at  the  same  time  so  chaste  that  these  mighty 
creations,  peopled  with  statues,  breathe  naught  but  the  purity  of  immaterial 
love.  Thou  didst  conquer  even  the  pride  of  those  haughty  Castilians,  who 
abhorred  labor  as  a  symbol  of  serfdom  ;  thou  didst  disarm  many  hands  that 
knew  no  glory  except  in  shedding  blood  ;  instead  of  a  sword  thou  didst  give 
them  a  trowel  and  a  chisel,  and  thou  didst  sustain  them  for  three  hundred 
years  in  thy  fields  of  peaceful  labor.  O  Notre  Dame  !  how  nobly  has  God 
rewarded  the  humility  of  his  handmaid  !  In  return  for  the  poor  house  of 
Nazareth,  where  thou  didst  lodge  his  Son,  what  magnificent  abodes  he  has 
given  thee  ! " 

On  his  way  home  from  Spain  Ozanam  made  a  pilgrimage 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Czanam.  287 

to  Notre  Dame  de  Buglosse,  a  sanctuary  close  to  the  native 
village  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  to  which,  needless  to  say,  he 
paid  a  loving  visit. 

"I  owed  it,"  he  explains  half-deprecatingly,  "to  the  beloved  patron  who 
protected  my  youth  amidst  so  many  dangers,  and  who  shed  such  unlooked-for 
blessings  on  our  humble  Conferences.  It  is  only  a  short  day's  journey  from 
Bayonne.  We  arrived  first  at  the  little  village  of  Pouy,  now  called  St.  Vin- 
cent de  Paul,  after  its  glorious  son.  We  saw  the  old  oak  under  which  St.  Vin- 
cent, when  he  was  a  little  shepherd  boy,  used  to  take  shelter  while  keeping  his 
flock.  The  fine  old  tree  only  holds  to  the  ground  by  the  bark  of  a  trunk  eaten 
away  by  the  yeaf;,  but  its  branches  are  magnificent,  and  even  in  this  advanced 
season  still  retain  their  green  foliage.  They  seemed  to  me  a  true  symbol  of 
the  foundations  of  St.  Vincent,  which  look  as  if  they  were  upheld  by  nothing 
human,  and  which  nevertheless  triumph  over  lime,  and  grow  in  the  midst  of 
revolutions.  I  send  you  a  leaf  from  the  blessed  tree  ;  it  will  dry  in  the  book 
where  you  place  it ;  but  charity  will  never  grow  dry  in  your  heart." 

Ozanam  had  felt  so  much  better  when  starting  on  this  little 
pilgrimage  that  he  made  it  rather  in  thanksgiving  than  in  sup- 
plication. He  was  therefore  somewhat  startled  when,  on  en- 
tering the  confessional  in  the  little  church,  the  priest,  who  had 
never  seen  him,  and  knew  nothing  about  him,  began  at  once 
to  exhort  him  to  patience  and  courage  in  suffering.  This 
spontaneous  advice  struck  him  all  the  more,  he  confessed  to 
Lallier,  because  there  was  something  in  the  childlike  simpli- 
city of  the  old  priest  that  reminded  him  of  St.  Vincent  de 
Paul.  "  He  spoke  of  nothing  but  patient  acceptance  of  pain, 
of  submission  to  the  will  of  God  in  sorrow,"  the  penitent  says, 
relating  the  incident;  "and  this  language  surprised  me,  feel- 
ing, as  I  did,  so  strong  and  well."  A  few  days  after  his  re- 
turn from  Buglosse  the  warning  began  to  prove  itself  pro- 
phetic. The  intense  fatigue  came  on  again,  and  with  it  other 
symptoms,  the  certain  forerunners  of  the  end.  But  he  did 
not  or  would  not  despond.  "  I  am  dwelling  in  a  land  of  de- 
lights," he  says,  alluding  to  the  beauty  of  the  surrounding 
scenery;  "  my  wife  and  child  are  in  perfect  health;  and  I,  the 
official  invalid  of  the  family,  am  indulging  in  pranks  of  every 
sort,  which,  if  they  reached  the  ears  of  the  Minister  of  Public 
Instruction,  would  very  probably  cut  short  my  conge" 


CHAPTER  XXV. 

While  Ozanam,  lingering  beneath  the  shadow  of  the  Py- 
renees, addresses  his  adieu  to  the  land  of  the  Cid,  before  set- 
ting forth  on  the  journey  which  was  to  be  his  last  in  this 
world,  we  will  pass  rapidly  in  review  those  of  his  works  which 
have  not  been  already  mentioned. 

Every  separable  book,  lecture,  and  essay  that  he  produced 
formed  part  of  the  vast  primary  plan  which  he  had  sketched 
out  for  himself  as  a  boy,  and  which  he  never  lost  sight  of  in 
his  literary  and  professional  career.  The  ascendency  of  this 
one  idea  in  his  mind  has  given  to  that  portion  of  the  work 
which  he  accomplished  a  character  of  unity  and  completeness, 
which  is  the  more  striking  when  we  consider  the  fragmentary 
and  sometimes  inverted  method  which  he  pursued.  He  began 
with  the  study  of  Dante,  and  he  announces  later  on  that  his 
purpose  is  to  give  a  complete  history  of  the  Barbarous  Ages, 
and  then  go  on  through  that  of  the  Middle  Ages,  up  to  the 
thirteenth  century,  where  he  will  stop  at  Dante,  as  the  culmi- 
nation of  that  epoch,  its  epitome,  and  its  glory. 

The  mere  outline  of  the  unfinished  monument  sufficiently 
indicates  the  mental  grasp  required  for  so  gigantic  a  scheme, 
while  the  energy  of  purpose  and  unswerving  fidelity  which  the 
historian  displays  in  its  execution  testify  to  a  greatness  of  soul 
and  true  love  of  science  still  more  admirable.  For  Ozanam's 
peculiar  circumstances  laid  him  especially  open  to  the  tempta- 
tion which  besets  most  men  of  letters  in  those  days  of  eager- 
ness for  ready  returns  and  easy  popularity.  But  he  spurned 
the  lower  service,  and  steadily  turned  his  back  on  that  liberal 
paymaster,  especially  in  France,  called  "actuality,"  and  faith- 
fully toiled  on  in  the  nobler  path  he  had  chosen  out  from  the 
beginning. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  289 

He  had  been  frequently  advised  to  let  his  lectures  be 
taken  down  in  sliorthand,  but  he  could  never  bring  himself 
to  consent,  owing  to  the  extreme  severity  which  he  exercised 
towards  his  work  and  the  high  finish  he  exacted  in  it.  In 
the  years  1849  and  1850,  however,  his  i*eluctance  was  over- 
come, and  the  reporters  of  the  Sorbonne  took  down  his  cours 
on  the  Fifth  Century.  He  himself  was  surprised  at  the  suc- 
cess of  the  experiment,  and  regretted  not  having  tried  it 
sooner.  This  regret  must  be  shared  by  all  who  have  read 
those  two  beautiful  volumes,  which  only  appeared  after  his 
death,  under  the  title  of  Civilisation  au  Cinquieme  SiecU. 
"  The  first  five  of  these  lectures,"  says  M.  Ampere,  in  his 
Preface  to  Ozanam's  works,  "  revised  by  the  author,  came 
out  in  the  Correspondant.  .  .  .  They  are  preceded  by  a  pre- 
face, which  is,  as  it  were,  his  literary  testament.  These  five 
lectures  form,  in  my  opinion,  one  of  the  finest  and  most  fin- 
ished pieces  that  have  issued  from  Ozanam's  pen." 

The  author's  own  introduction  to  the  work  forms  the  best 
commentary  that  could  be  written  on  it,  and  unfolds  its  de- 
sign more  clearly  than  a  volume  of  reviews.  This  preface 
was  written  in  the  afternoon  of  Good  Friday,  185 1,  on  his  re- 
turn from  those  sublime  offices  in  which  the  Church  com- 
memorates the  most  sacred  mystery  of  our  faith.  It  opens 
thus: 

"  I  purpose  writing  the  literary  history  of  the  Middle  Ages,  from  the  fifth 
century  to  the  close  of  the  thirteenth,  up  to  Dante,  where  I  shall  stop,  as  at  the 
point  most  worthy  of  representing  that  grand  ep>och.  But  in  the  history  of 
letters  I  shall  make  civilization,  of  which  they  are  the  flower,  my  chief  study, 
and  in  civilization  I  recognize  the  chief  work  of  Christianity.  ...  As  a  lay- 
man, I  have  no  mission  to  deal  with  theological  subjects,  and  God,  moreover, 
who  loves  to  be  served  by  the  eloquence  of  man,  finds  plenty  in  our  day  to 
vindicate  our  dogmas.  But  while  Catholics  were  absorbed  with  the  defence 
of  doctrine,  the  unbelieving  seized  upon  history.  They  laid  hands  upon  the 
Middle  Ages,  they  sat  in  judgment  upon  the  Church,  judging  her  sometimes 
with  enmity,  sometimes  with  the  respect  due  to  a  fine  ruin,  often  with  a  levity 
ihey  would  noL  have  used  in  treating  profane  subjects.  We  must  reconquer 
this  territory,  \vl5ich  belongs  to  us,  since  we  find  it  cleared  by  the  hands  of  our 
monks,  our  Benedictines,  and  our  Bollandists — those  men  who  did  not  think 
their  life  ill  spent  in  growing  pale  over  parchments  and  legends,  .  ,  .  Gib- 


290  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

bon  the  historian  went  to  visit  Rome  in  his  youth.  One  day,  while  wander- 
ing through  the  Capitol,  the  sound  of  hymns  broke  suddenly  on  his  ear ;  he 
saw  the  doors  of  the  basilica  of  the  Ara  Coeli  open,  and  a  long  procession  of 
Franciscan  monks  come  forth,  brushing  with  their  sandals  the  pavement  tra- 
versed by  so  many  triumphs.  It  was  then  that  indignation  inspired  him  ;  he 
formed  the  design  of  avenging  antiquity,  outraged  by  Christian  barbarism ; 
he  conceived  the  plan  of  the  Decline  of  the  Roman  Empire.  And  I  too  have 
beheld  the  monks  of  Ara  Coeli  treading  on  the  venerable  pavement  of  Jupiter 
Capitolinus  ;  I  saw  it,  and  I  rejoiced  as  at  the  victory  of  love 'over  strength, 
and  I  resolved  to  write  the  history  of  the  progress  of  that  period  where  the 
English  philosopher  saw  nothing  but  decay,  the  history  of  civilization  in  the 
barbarous  ages,  the  history  of  the  human  mind  escaping  from  the  shipwreck 
of  the  empire  of  letters,  and  traversing  the  flood  of  the  invasions,  as  the  He- 
brews crossed  the  Red  Sea,  and  under  the  same  guidance  :  forti  tegente  bra- 
chio.  I  know  nothing  more  supernatural,  nothing  that  proves  more  clearly 
the  divinity  of  Christianity,  than  to  have  saved  the  human  mind." 

He  foresees  that  many  will  tax  him  with  inopportune  zeal, 
alleging  that  the  accusations  of  the  eighteenth  century  have 
fallen  into  oblivion  or  discredit,  that  a  reaction,  almost  exces- 
sive, has  set  in  concerning  the  decried  Middle  Ages;  but  this 
argument  has  no  weight  with  him.  Experience  and  iiistory 
go  to  prove  how  little  these  sudden  revulsions  in  publ-x  feel- 
ing are  to  be  trusted ;  they  come  and  go,  "  like  the  wave 
falling  back  from  the  shore  it  caresses."  A  tendency  tu  keep 
aloof  from  these  stern  Christian  epochs  was  already  manifest- 
ing itself;  many  who  were  ready  to  admire  the  grand  charac- 
ter of  their  genius  could  not  brook  their  austerity. 

"  There  is  at  the  bottom  of  human  nature  an  imperishable  paganism  which 
wakes  up  in  every  century,  which  is  not  dead  in  ours,  and  which  is  always 
ready  to  fall  back  into  pagan  philosophies,  into  pagan  laws  and  pagan  arts,  be- 
cause men  find  there  the  realization  of  their  dreams,  and  the  satisfaction  of  their 
instincts.  Gibbon's  thesis  is  still  that  of  half  Germany  ;  it  is  the  thesis  of  all 
the  sensual  schools,  who  accuse  Christianity  of  stifling  the  legitimate  develop- 
ment of  human  nature  by  denying  the  flesh,  by  adjourning  to  a  future  state  the 
happiness  that  ought  to  be  found  here  below,  by  destroying  that  enchanted 
world  where  Greece  had  deified  strength,  riches,  and  pleasure,  and  supplant- 
ing it  by  a  sorrowful  world  where  humility,  poverty,  and  chastity  keep  guard 
at  the  foot  of  the  cross." 

Ozanam  is  careful,  on  the  other  hand,  to  avoid  falling  into 
the  opposite  snare  of  excessive  admiration  for  the  Middle 
Ages,  an  extreme  which  leads  its  enthusiasts  to  ignore  their 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozariain.  291 

dangers,  and  even  to  justify  their  errors,  thus  apparently  mak- 
ing Christianity  responsible  for  the  disorders  of  an  age  in 
which  it  is  represented  as  reigning  supreme  over  the  hearts 
and  minds  of  men. 

*'  We  must  know  how  to  praise  the  majesty  of  the  cathedrals  and  the  hero- 
ism of  the  Crusades  without  condoning  the  horrors  of  eternal  warfare,  the 
harshness  of  feudal  institutions,  the  scandal  of  princes  perpetually  at  war  with 
the  Holy  See  on  account  of  their  divorces  and  their  simonies.  We  must  see 
the  evil  as  it  is,  that  is  to  say,  formidable,  precisely  in  order  the  better  to  ap- 
preciate the  services  of  the  Church,  whose  glory  it  is,  during  these  misunder- 
stood centuries,  not  to  have  reigned,  but  to  have  fought.  I  approach  my  sub- 
ject, consequently,  full  of  horror  of  barbarism,  and  of  respect  for  all  that  was 
praiseworthy  in  the  inheritance  of  antique  civilization.  ...  I  write  .  .  . 
because,  God  not  having  given  me  strength  enough  to  guide  the  plough,  I 
must,  nevertheless,  obey  the  common  law  of  labor,  and  do  my  day's  work.  I 
write,  like  those  workmen  of  the  first  centuries,  who  turned  vases  of  clay  or 
glass  to  serve  for  the  daily  uses  of  the  Church,  and  in  whose  rude  designs  the 
Good  Shepherd,  the  Virgin,  and  the  Saints  were  represented.  These  poor  work- 
men never  dreamed  of  the  future,  and  yet  some  fragments  of  their  vases,  dis- 
covered in  cemeteries  fifteen  hundred  years  afterwards,  come  forth  to  bear  wit- 
ness and  prove  the  antiquity  of  a  contested  dogma. 

"  We  are  all  unprofitable  servants,  but  we  serve  a  Master  who  is  absolutely 
economical,  who  lets  nothing  go  to  waste,  not  a  drop  of  the  sweat  of  our  brow 
any  more  than  a  drop  of  His  heavenly  dew.  I  know  not  what  fate  awaits  this 
book,  whether  I  shall  finish  it,  or  whether  I  shall  reach  even  the  end  of  the 
page  that  flies  beneath  my  i)en.  But  I  know  enough  to  throw  into  it  the 
remnant,  be  it  great  or  small,  of  my  strength  and  of  my  days." 

It  was  the  year  of  the  Jubilee,  the  annie  sainte^  when  these 
pages  were  written,  and  Ozanam  thus  touchingly  alludes  to  the 
coincidence : 

"  It  was  on  Good  Friday,  in  1300,  the  year  of  the  Great  Jubilee,  when 
Dante,  arrived,  as  he  said,  midway  on  the  road  of  life,  disabused  alike  of 
passions  and  of  errors,  began  his  pilgrimage  in  hell,  in  purgatory,  and  in 
paradise.  On  the  threshold  of  his  journey  his  heart  failed  him  for  one 
moment  ;  but  from  the  courts  of  heaven  three  blessed  women  were  watching 
over  him,  the  Virgin  Mary,  St.  Lucia,  and  Beatrice.  Virgil  guided  his  foot- 
steps, and,  on  the  faith  of  this  guide,  the  poet  plunged  courageously  into  the 
gloomy  pathway.  Alas  !  I  have  not  his  grand  soul,  but  I  have  his  faith.  Like 
him,  in  the  middle  of  my  life,  I  have  seen  the  holy  year,  the  year  which  divides 
the  stormy  and  the  fertile  century,  the  year  that  renews  Catholic  con- 
sciences. .  .  . 

"  But  whereas  Virgil  forsakes  his  disciple  before  the  end  of  his  career,  for  it 
was  not  permitted  him  to  cross  the  threshold  of  paradise,  Dante,  on  the  con- 


292  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanain. 

trary,  will  accompany  me  to  the  utmost  heights  of  the  Middle  Ages,  where  his 
own  place  is  marked  out.  Three  blessed  women  will  also  look  down  upon 
me — the  Virgin  Mary,  my  mother,  and  my  sister,  while  she  who  is  my  Beatrice 
is  still  left  to  me  on  earth  to  sustain  me  by  a  look  and  a  smile,  to  lift  me  from 
despondency,  to  reveal  to  me,  under  its  most  touching  image,  that  power  of 
Christian  love  whose  works  I  am  about  to  relate." 

The  plan  unfolded  in  these  pages  is  magnificently  executed; 
and  yet  these  two  volumes  are  but  the  introduction,  the  atrium, 
as  it  were,  of  the  temple  Ozanam  proposed  to  build.  The 
magnitude  and  variety  of  subjects  which  even  this  fraction  of 
the  work  embraces  render  anything  like  an  adequate  analysis 
of  it  impossible  in  one  chapter  of  a  biography.  We  can 
merely  glance  over  it,  and  point  to  the  parts  that  strike  us 
most  by  their  power  and  interest. 

Ozanam  first  explains  the  nature  and  essence  of  Paganism, 
its  action  and  effect  on  humanity  in  the  barbarous  ages ;  he 
shows  us  Rome  planting  her  victorious  eagles  on  every  soil, 
civilizing  the  peoples  she  had  conquered,  making  laws,  en- 
couraging letters  and  arts,  and  splendidly  patronizing  the 
gods.  He  leads  us  gradually  to  the  point  where  Paganism  is 
nothing  but  a  mask  to  hide  the  deification  of  Rome.  The 
mistress  of  the  world  flings  back  the  portals  of  her  Pantheon, 
and  invites  the  nations  to  come  and  worship ;  every  god  has 
an  altar  there ;  but  the  only  divinity  Rome  adores  is  Rome ; 
rites  and  oracles  and  priests  are  nothing  but  a  pompous  mas- 
querade kept  up  for  the  entertainment  of  the  people-king. 
By  the  time  that  Caesarism  had  become  the  true  idolatry  of 
Rome,  its  tyranny  had  invaded  not  only  the  life  and  property 
of  the  subject,  but  his  soul  and  conscience.  Sometimes  the 
god  is  called  Nero,  sometimes  Trajan,  sometimes  Heliogaba- 
lus,  but  his  works  do  not  change ;  the  Empire  is  always  the 
same — a  paganism  whose  divinity  and  high-priest  is  the  empe- 
ror ;  his  very  statue  is  worshipped  with  divine  honors ;  thou- 
sands of  Christians  are  tortured  and  slain  because  they  are  too 
stiff-necked  to  burn  a  few  grains  of  incense  at  its  feet. 

Slavery,  the  natural  outcome  of  this  deification,  is  laid  bare 
in  all  its  degrading  cruelty.      It  was  forbidden  to  kill  a  slave, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  293 

but  the  freeman  might  lawfully  torture  him  to  death  provided 
he  paid  his  value  to  his  master.  The  master  was  obHged  to 
feed  his  human  cattle,  and  the  following  receipt  of  Cato's 
"  for  making  wine  for  slaves  "  gives  us  an  idea  of  how  tenderly 
this  duty  was  performed : 

•'  Put  into  a  cask  ten  axnphoras  of  sweet  wine,  and  two  of  very  sharp  vine- 
gar, and  boil  down  till  this  diminishes  to  two-thirds,  with  fifty  amphoras  of 
fresh  water ;  keep  it  stirred  with  a  stick  for  five  consecutive  days,  and  then  add 
sixty-four  sextarii  *  of  sea-water,"  t 

"  How  truly  we  recognize  Paganism  here ! "  exclaims  Oza- 
nam. "  This  bitter  draught  that  it  prepares  for  the  slave  re- 
calls the  sponge  steeped  in  vinegar  and  gall  that  another 
Roman  tenders  on  the  point  of  his  lance  to  another  Slave 
dying  on  the  Cross  for  the  ransom  of  slaves."  The  slave, 
under  this  revolting  system,  became  a  mere  beast,  without 
soul,  conscience,  or  intelligence.  He  was  used  to  try  poisons 
on,  as  we  use  rats  and  other  vermin ;  he  had  no  more  human 
individuality  than  a  dog  or  a  horse.  Seneca  indeed  once  ven- 
tured on  hypothesis  that  slaves  might  after  all  be  men  like 
ourselves,  but  this  same  man,  who  philosophized  so  loftily  on 
disinterestedness  and  poverty,  possessed  twenty  thousand 
slaves,  and  there  is  no  record  of  his  ever  having  freed  one  of 
them.  The  slaves  had  themselves  come  to  believe  that  their 
owners  must  be  right,  and  that  they  were  a  lower  race  of  dis- 
inherited outcasts  whom  Jupiter  had  deprived  of  half  their 
reason  in  condemning  them  to  the  condition  of  bondsmen. 
And  the  poor — how  did  it  fare  with  them  ?  Worse  than  with 
the  slaves,  if  that  were  possible. 

And  yet  such  was  the  prestige  of  Roman  power  that  in 
spite  of  the  degradation  and  corruption  it  bred  in  its  domin- 
ions, the  most  enlightened  philosophers  believed  the  salvation 
of  the  world  identical  with  its  reign,  with  the  endurance  of  an 
empire  which  Tertullian  said  "  alone  suspended  the  end  of 

*  A  Roman  measure  equal  to  twelve  bushels. 
t  Cato,  de  Re  Rustica,  i.  civ. 


294  i^{f^  ^'^^^  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

time."  When  the  news  went  forth  that  the  Goths  were 
marching  on  Rome,  that  Alaric  was  before  the  gates  bargain- 
ing with  Honorius  for  the  city,  its  inhabitants,  and  its  trea- 
sure, even  St.  Jerome,  in  the  depths  of  his  Eastern  solitude, 
trembled  and  cried  out  in  dismay,  "  A  terrible  report  reaches 
us  from  the  West.  They  talk  of  Rome  besieged,  ransomed 
with  gold,  besieged  again,  so  that  lives  may  perish  after  pro- 
perty has  gone.  My  voice  is  choked,  sobs  stifle  the  words  \ 
am  dictating." 

The  mighty  genius  of  St.  Augustine  alone  viewed  the  great 
catastrophe  undismayed.  Amidst  the  clash  of  warring  races, 
of  empires  falling  to  pieces  and  thrones  crumbling  under 
Gothic  battle-axes,  Augustine  calmly  looks  back  to  the  origin 
of  time,  and  forward  to  its  fulfilment,  and  discerning  the  desti- 
nies of  Rome  and  the  world  through  the  light  of  Christianity, 
he  proclaims  the  law  of  Christian  progress  in  his  wonderful 
work,  The  City  of  God. 

The  barbarians  brought  a  stream  of  fresh  manhood  into  the 
effeminate  empire  they  overturned;  they  introduced  those 
two  primary  elements  of  all  civilization,  the  dignity  of  man 
and  respect  for  women;  they  set  the  slave  free;  they  raised 
woman,  from  a  base  instrument  of  man's  pleasure,  into 
a  divinity ;  they  placed  her  on  a  pedestal  and  knelt  to 
her  as  the  Velleda  who  could  foretell  their  destinies  and 
avert  them. 

Christianity  entered  through  this  breach  in  the  wall  of 
Paganism,  and,  following  up  the  work  begun  by  the  barba- 
rians, enthroned  woman  as  a  queen  on  her  own  hearth,  the 
equal  of  man,  his  guardian  angel  and  comforter,  thus  develop- 
ing into  a  virtue  what  was  but  a  primitive  instinct  in  the 
savage  mind. 

Christianity  changed  the  slave  into  the  working-man,  and 
was  the  first  to  reinstate  him  in  a  position  of  dignity  and  inde- 
pendence. The  early  Christians  worked  for  their  bread ;  the 
Anchorites,  Cenobites,  and  Monks  gave  more  time  to  manual 
\^bor  than  to  contemplation,     Cicero  had  worked  at  manual 


Life  and  ]\\rks  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  295 

labor,  and  declared  there  could  be  "  nothing  liberal  in  it  " ; 
the  Gospel  exalts  it,  and  imposes  it  as  a  duty  upon  all  men. 

Paganism  despised  the  poor,  and  even  held  it  wrong  to 
succor  wretches  who  were  abandoned  and  cursed  of  the  gods ; 
Christianity  proclaimed  them  blessed.  Poverty  was  thus 
established  in  a  society  that  was  expiring  of  over-luxury  and 
wealth  ;  chastity  was  crowned  and  glorified  in  a  society  that 
was  destroyed  by  its  own  corrupt  excesses ;  obedience  became 
the  law  where  all  was  perishing  from  disorder. 

Ozanam  describes  at  considerable  length,  and  in  language 
of  singular  beauty,  the  change  which  Christianity  effected  in 
the  social  position  of  woman  ;  and  he  shows,  too,  how  worthily 
she  performed  the  duties  imposed  by  her  new  privileges,  and 
what  a  noble  part  she  played  in  the  progress  of  the  religion 
to  which  she  owed  them.  Fearing,  however,  that  he  might 
be  suspected  of  sympathizing  with  unreasonable  claims  which 
had  already  begun  to  be  put  forth  in  her  name,  he  adds : 

"We  must  not  conclude  from  this  that  Christianity  had  destroyed  what 
nature  had  done  ;  that  it  meant  to  precipitate  women  into  public  hfe  and  re- 
establish that  absolute  equality  which  the  materialism  of  our  age  has  dreamed 
of.  No ;  Christianity  is  too  spiritual  to  accept  such  an  idea.  The  role  of 
Christian  women  was  something  similar  to  that  of  the  guardian  angels — they 
might  lead  the  world,  but  while  remaining  invisible  themselves.  It  is  very 
seldom  that  angels  become  visible  in  the  hour  of  supreme  danger,  as  the  angel 
Raphael  did  to  Tobit ;  so  is  it  only  at  certain  moments,  long  foreseen,  that  the 
empire  of  women  becomes  visible,  and  that  we  behold  these  angels,  who  were 
the  saviours  of  Christian  society,  manifesting  themselves  under  the  name  of 
Blanche  of  Castile  and  Joan  of  Arc." 

Christianity  had  been  accused  by  a  certain  school  of  having 
corrupted  the  Latin  tongue,  whereas,  on  the  contrary,  it  was 
Christianity  that  saved  it.  Even  in  Cicero's  time  its  purity 
was  affected,  as  we  learn  from  his  complaints  that  "  the  great 
influx  of  strangers  is  adulterating  the  language."  And  Quin- 
tilian,  under  Vespasian,  laments,  too,  that  in  his  day  "  the 
whole  language  is  changed."  Christianity  came  not  to  destroy 
but  to  rescue  Latin,  and  the  chief  instrument  in  this  re- 
demption was  the    Vulgate,  translated,  as  we  know,  in  part 


296  Life  and  Works  of- Frederic  Ozanam. 

from  the  Greek,  in  part  from  the  Hebrew,  and  thus  destined 
to  penetrate  the  minds  of  the  people  with  the  poetry  of  the 
East  on  one  side,  and  on  the  other  with  the  philosophical  lore 
of  Greece.  The  Bible  itself  was  served  in  this  mission  by  two 
unlooked-for  auxiliaries,  the  Africans  and  the  people — that  is 
to  say,  a  people  half-barbarous  at  the  period  we  speak  of. 
Ozanam  lays  considerable  stress  on  this  African  character  in- 
troduced into  the  Latin  literature  by  Cornutus,  the  disciple  of 
Seneca ;  by  Fronto,  the  master  of  Marcus  AureUus ;  by  Ne- 
mesius,  by  Tertulhan,  who  brings  in  his  wake  St.  Cyprian,  and, 
above  all,  St.  Augustine.  Whatever  importance  may  be 
legitimately  attached  to  this  innovation,  it  is  clear  that  the 
Christian  tongue  dates  from  TertuUian,  and  that  it  is  destined 
to  be  the  language  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  the  mother  tongue 
of  all  modern  languages.  This  is  what  Christianity  accom- 
plished through  the  instrumentality  of  the  Vulgate,  and  with  the 
Africans  and  barbarians  as  helpmates. 

"  Our  ancestors  were  right  to  carry  the  Bible  in  triumph  and  cover  it  with 
gold,"  says  Ozanam.  "The  first  of  ancient  books  is  likewise  the  first  of 
modem  ones ;  it  is,  so  to  speak,  the  author  of  these  very  books,  for  it  is  from 
its  pages  that  were  to  come  forth  the  languages,  the  eloquence,  the  poetry,  and 
the  civilization  of  modern  times," 

The  concluding  chapters  of  La  Civilisation  au  5*^  Steele 
show  the  gradual  development  of  those  things  in  detail — his- 
tory, poetry,  art,  the  material  civilization  of  the  Empire  up  to 
the  formation  of  the  neo-Latin  nations.  The  charm  and 
vigor  of  the  style  are  sustained  to  the  last  page,  and  carry 
even  the  unlearned  reader  with  unabated  interest  through 
labyrinths  of  research  which  excite  the  admiration  of  the  most 
erudite. 

Historians  had  opened  a  gulf,  as  it  were,  between  antiquity 
and  barbarism.  It  has  been  the  triumph  of  Ozanam  to  bridge 
this  over,  and,  by  his  patient  genius  and  original  investigations, 
to  re-establish  those  lines  of  communication  which  Providence 
never  allows  to  fail  in  time  any  more  than  in  space. 

A  year  or  so  after  Ozanam's  death  this  work  was  crowned 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  297 

at  the  Academic  Fran9aise,  which  adjudged  to  it  the  annual 
prize  of  ten  thousand  francs,  just  then  founded,  for  the  finest 
literary  work  produced  within  the  year.  M.  Villemain  was 
charged  with  the  panegyric  for  the  occasion,  and  as  the 
opinion  of  so  illustrious  a  critic  is  in  itself  a  valuable  testi- 
mony, we  cannot  refrain  from  quoting  the  following  passage 
from  his  speech : 

♦*  Learned  and  natural,  always  dominated  by  the  same  idea,  while  radiant 
with  a  thousand  memories,  accurate  and  full  of  charming  fancies,  this  book  is 
an  eminent  work  of  literature  and  taste.  It  raises  criticism  to  eloquence  ;  it 
conceives  and  seeks  and  finds  eloquence  itself  in  its  highest  source,  in  that 
type  which  never  dies,  or  which  rather  is  for  ever  born  anew  in  the  native  in- 
stinct of  a  soul  that  vibrates  to  the  good  and  the  beautiful,  to  everything  noble 
here  below,  Nartue,  liberty,  science,  and  to  those  great  truths  above  which 
constitute  the  promise  of  Christian  faith  and  hope." 

The  most  superficial  perusal  of  these  volumes  enables  us  to 
form  a  pretty  good  idea  of  what  Ozanam's  completed  work 
would  have  been.  We  see  here  how  he  performed  the  pre- 
liminary task  of  clearing  the  ground,  making  his  way  step  by 
step  through  the  gloomy  night  of  barbarism  until  the  first 
streak  of  dawn  appears,  and  the  Gospel  enters  and  plants  the 
regenerating  doctrine  of  Christ  crucified  on  the  ruins  of  the 
effete  and  spurious  civilization  of  Rome. 

This  picture  was  to  have  been  followed  up  by  another, 
equally  comprehensive  and  finished,  of  all  the  barbarous 
tribes  in  the  wild,  free  life  of  their  native  forests.  We  should 
have  seen  them  encamped  on  the  ruins  of  the  Empire,  and 
watched  them  gradually  conquered  by  the  teaching  of  the 
Church,  learning  to  respect  those  things  which  they  had  in- 
tended  to  destroy — religion,  letters,  and  art.  Advancing 
through  the  dreary  waste  of  the  sixth,  seventh,  and  eighth 
centuries,  we  should  have  come  to  Charlemagne,  who  with 
one  hand  arrested  the  tide  of  the  invasion,  and  with  the  other 
rekindled  the  all  but  extinct  light  of  letters.  This  would 
have  brought  us  to  that  period  when  the  seeds  of  a  new  and 
fertile   literature   were    beginning   to   germinate — when    the 


298  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

young  idioms  were  lisping  their  first  songs  of  chivalrous 
romance,  and  the  enthusiasm  of  the  Crusades  was  drawing 
the  chivalry  of  Europe  to  the  East,  while,  simultaneously 
with  this  glorious  movement,  the  Communes  were  awakening 
to  their  liberties,  and  the  schools  were  filling  the  world  witii 
the  noise  of  their  learned  strife— thus,  step  by  step,  we  sliould 
have  reached  the  thirteenth  century,  which  ushers  in  the 
Christian  Renaissance. 

Ozanam  has  handled  almost  every  point  of  this  immense 
programme  in  the  course  of  his  work,  but  the  only  portions 
of  it  that  he  accomplished  thoroughly  are  the  beginning  and 
the  end.  The  History  of  Civilizaiio?i  in  the  Fifth  Century, 
and  Dante  J  or,  Catholic  Philosophy  in  the  Thirteenth  Cen- 
tury, the  Etudes  Germaniques,  and  the  Foetes  Franciscains  find 
their  places  at  separate  intervals  between  these  two  works, 
which  he  calls  "  les  galons  extremes  de  nion  ouvrage^ 

Les  Etudes  Gerrtianiques  form  two  volumes,  entitled  The 
Condition  of  the  Germajis  before  Christianity,  and  Civilization 
afnongst  the  Franks ;  in  other  words,  the  ecclesiastical,  politi- 
cal, and  literary  history  of  the  Merovingian  period  and  the 
reign  of  Charlemagne,  the  study  of  the  German  people  pre- 
vious to  their  transformation  by  Christian itv,  and  the  study 
of  this  transformation  in  itself.  Ozanam  is  assisted  in  his 
laborious  expedition  through  this  remote  and  obscure  past  by 
Tacitus  and  some  German  savants ;  but  they  lend  him  at  best 
a  flickering  light.  As  we  see  him  plunge  into  the  sombre 
regions  he  has  undertaken  to  explore,  we  are  unconsciously 
reminded  of  an  adventurous  traveller  embarking  on  the  obli- 
terated pathways  of  one  of  those  notorious  forests  of  Germany, 
with  no  hght  to  guide  his  steps  but  a  feeble  torch,  whose 
vacillating  flame  every  gust  of  wind  threatens  to  blow  out. 
He  does  full  justice  to  the  erudition  and  honesty  of  his  pre- 
cursors, but  he  contradicts  them  at  every  turn,  challenges 
their  assertions,  disproves  their  facts,  and  refutes  their  argu- 
ments. He  tears  up  the  flimsy  delusion  of  patriotic  writers 
who,  like  Gervinus,  the  historian  of  German  poetry,  senti* 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  299 

mentally  bewail  "  the  mildness  of  Catholicism,  which  has 
destroyed  their  warlike  ancestors.*'  Ozanam  follows  up  the 
study  of  the  ancient  religion  of  Germany  to  its  earliest  origin, 
in  order  to  show  what  were  the  obstacles  and  the  resources 
which  it  was  one  day  to  present  to  Christianity. 

"Many  German  historians,  in  discovering  in  the  traditions  of  their  fatlier- 
land  those  grand  notions  of  the  Divinity,  of  immortality,  and  of  justice  which 
sustain  the  whole  human  conscience,  have  reproached  the  Christian  mission- 
aries with  having  come  to  disturb  a  people  who  had  no  need  of  them,  and  of 
having  calumniated  creeds  that  they  did  not  understand.  It  is  consequently  a 
novelty  in  favor  nowadav-s  to  absolve  idolatry,  to  justify  even  those  obscene 
idols  which  the  ancients  adored,  we  are  informed,  in  innocent  simplicity.  .  .  . 
It  was  therefore  necessary  to  show  the  excess  to  which  superstition  was  carried 
by  these  peoples,  and  how  it  was  leading  on  to  the  overthrow  of  all  the  pro- 
tecting laws  of  humanity,  if  '^e  Gospel  had  not  come  in  time  to  reinstate 
them." 

The  historian  goes  on  to  show  how  everywhere,  in  manners, 
customs,  laws,  and  creeds,  barbarism  reveals  its  true  character 
of  savage  violence,  cruelty,  and  immorality.  He  does  not 
deny  the  existence  of  the  noble  ideas  which  the  enthusiasts  of 
Paganism  claim  for  it,  but  he  shows  that  these  elements  of 
true  greatness  and  power  are  not  radically  either  pagan  or 
German ;  they  are  simply  a  remnant  of  Christianity,  which 
links  the  most  famous  creeds  of  antiquity  to  the  creed  of  the 
Gospel.  Such  were  the  laws  for  the  protection  of  family  ties, 
property,  public  justice,  and  other  fine  traits  which  bear  a 
striking  family  resemblance  to  tlie  legislation  of  the  East. 
The  languages,  too,  bear  many  signs  of  kindred  with  the 
Latin,  Greek,  and  Sanscrit  tongues,  while  their  poetry  con- 
tains an  unmistakable  ring  of  the  old  fables  of  the  classical 
apogee.  The  traces  of  a  tradition,  common  alike  to  the  no- 
mad tribes  of  the  North  and  the  more  polished  races  of  the 
South,  are  everywhere  visible.  Everywhere  we  see  the  same 
essential  conditions,  however  disguised  under  special  charac- 
teristics ;  it  is  always  an  old  order  of  things  at  war  with  the 
spirit  of  disorder  and  destruction,  always  strife  and  antagonism, 
the  inevitable   and   distinctive  character  of  barbarism  \    tliS 


300  Life  and  IVhrh  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

upheaving  of  that  "  imperishable  paganism  "  which  Ozanam 
declares  to  be  an  inalienable  instinct  of  human  nature. 

These  preliminary  studies  announce  plainly  enough  whither 
the  conclusion  tends.  The  predominant  idea  from  first  to 
last  is  the  fraternity  of  the  German  nations  with  the  two 
great  races  of  the  North,  the  Celts  and  the  Slavs,  as  well  as 
with  the  Southern  races;  the  radical  unity,  in  fact,  of  the 
Indo-European  peoples  as  demonstrated  by  the  immigration 
of  tribes,  by  the  comparison  of  mythologies,  by  the  resem- 
blance of  laws,  languages,  and  religions,  and  a  subsisting  basis 
of  principles  and  traditions. 

"  There  is  no  people,  however  barbarous,  in  whom  we  do  not  detect  some 
vestige  of  civilization  struggling  to  defend  itself  ;  there  is  none  so  refined  but 
that  we  can  put  our  finger  on  some  root  of  barbarism  which  nothing  can 
eradicate.  At  the  bottom  of  every  community,  as  in  the  depth  of  every  human 
conscience,  we  come  upon  law  and  revolt,  we  find  contradiction  and  disorder ; 
that  is  to  say,  what  God  has  not  put  there." 

It  required  nothing  short  of  the  courage  of  Christianity  to 
claim  brotherhood  for  the  fierce  rude  German  races  with  the 
refined  Greeks  and  Romans,  and  it  was  a  task  worthy  of  mo- 
dern science  and  Christian  philosophy  to  undertake  to  search 
out  and  produce  the  links  of  this  kindred. 

"  It  was  reserved  to  philology,"  says  Ozanam,  "that  is  to  say,  to  a  study 
which  is  counted  idle  and  barren,  to  arrive  at  these  fertile  discoveries,  to  refute 
the  conjectures  of  the  materialists,  and  to  establish,  by  the  community  of  lan- 
guage and  ideas,  an  incontestable  community  of  origin  between  the  blue-eyed, 
stalwart  races  who  wandered  through  the  wildernesses  of  the  north,  and  those 
other  races  browned  by  the  sun,  small-limbed  and  hot-blooded,  who  built 
cities,  opened  schools,  and  dug  out  ports  under  the  fiery  skies  of  the  south." 

We  do  not  pretend  to  estimate  this  dogma,  to  discuss  its 
merits  or  its  flaws ;  we  merely  aim  at  giving  some  idea  of  the 
work  before  us,  of  its  research,  its  power  of  synthesis,  its  clear, 
subtle  analysis,  and  that  union  of  qualities  which  render  his- 
tory a  science  as  admirable  as  it  is  useful,  a  science  which 
lays  bare  to  mankind  the  story  of  their  travail  and  mission  in 
the  past,  making  it  a  light  to  them  for  the  accomplishment  of 
their  destinies  in  the  yet  unacted  drama  of  the  future. 


Life  and  Works  oj  Frederic  Ozanam.  301 

Ozanam  proceeds  in  the  second  part  of  this  first  volume  t.o 
show  us  the  conflict  between  the  Germans  and  the  Romans. 
He  describes  the  causes  of  the  power  of  Rome  and  of  her 
weakness,  her  conquest  ot  Germany  and  its  resuhs :  cities 
founded,  roads  made,  forests  cleared  away,  Paganism  thus  de- 
spoiled of  those  sylvan  solitudes  where,  as  in  an  inaccessible 
stronghold,  its  gods  abode,  the  entire  mechanism  of  imperial 
civilization — political  institutions,  military  and  municipal  sys- 
tems, schools,  etc. — is  examined  and  judged  with  rigorous  im- 
partiality ;  its  merits  and  vices  are  faithfully  depicted.  We 
watch  the  decline  of  letters  in  the  imperial  schools ;  we  see 
the  growing  cruelty  of  the  Roman  government,  and  the  im- 
placable hatred  with  which  it  is  regarded  by  the  vanquished 
race.  It  had  conquered  the  territory  and  taken  the  people 
captive,  but  there  was  one  fortress  beyond  the  reach  of  its 
victorious  arms ;  this  was  the  human  conscience,  and  so  long 
as  tliis  remained  impregnable  the  victory  was  incon  plete ;  the 
conqueror  was  defied  by  an  element  of  resistance  which, 
sooner  or  later,  must  triumph,  and  prove  to  him  that  no  force 
of  arms,  however  tremendous,  can  annihilate  that  which  alone 
and  truly  constitutes  a  people — their  nationality. 

Yet  Ozanam  would  not  have  us  conclude  that  the  mission 
of  Rome  in  Germany  was  altogether  fruitless  or  fatal. 

"  When  Providence  takes  such  workmen  as  the  Romans  for  a  work,  we  may 
be  assured,"  he  says,  "it  is  for  no  ordinary  purpose."  "When  it  permits  a 
country  to  be  for  three  hundred  years  ploughed  up  by  fearful  wars  we  may 
know  that  God  means  Himself  to  scatter  the  seed  in  the  furrows.  At  the  mo- 
ment when  Drusus  was  tnrowing  bridges  across  the  Rhine,  and  cutting  roads 
through  the  piack  Forest,  it  was  time  to  make  haste,  for  ten  years  later  a  town 
of  Judea  would  give  birth  to  Him  whose  disciples  were  to  pass  along  these 
roads,  and  complete  the  destruction  of  barbarism.  The  laws  of  the  Emperors, 
so  learnedly  commented  on  by  the  jurisconsults,  were  introducing  the  reign  of 
justice,  which  prepared  the  way  for  the  law  of  charity.  The  Latin  tongue 
was  helping  the  human  mind  to  acquire  those  habits  of  clearness,  precision, 
and  firmness  which  are  as  necessary  to  the  progress  of  science  as  to  the  main- 
tenance of  the  faith." 

The  second  volume  of  the  Etudes  Germaniqties  goes  on  to 
show  how  this  conquest,  which  baffled  the  legions  of  Caesar 


^Oi  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Oza?iam. 

and  the  prestige  of  Rome,  was  achieved  by  the  omnipotent 
sweetness  of  the  Church  of  Christ.  The  Franks,  who  had  be- 
come the  first  champions  of  the  Gospel,  took  the  Cross  in 
their  hand,  and,  plunging  into  the  dark  forests  beyond  the 
Rhine,  went  forth  to  attack  barbarism  in  its  very  citadel. 
They  used  no  weapons  but  love,  gentleness,  and  self-devotion ; 
but,  stronger  with  these  than  the  soldiers  who  had  overcome 
the  world,  they  triumphed;  patience  conquered  those  stout 
hearts  and  rebellious  natures,  which  the  power  of  arms  had 
proved  powerless  to  subdue.  The  author  dwells  with  pecu- 
liar furce  on  the  three  great  events  which  decide  the  complete 
triumph  of  Christianity — the  conversion  of  the  Franks,  the 
preaching  mission  of  the  Irish,  and  the  conversion  of  the  An- 
glo-Saxons. The  mission  of  the  Franks  is  clearly  defined 
from  the  moment  when  the  conversion  of  Ciovis  enlisted  them 
under  the  flag  of  Christianity,  and  made  them  successors  to 
the  Romans  in  arresting  the  tide  of  invasion;  they  make 
Christianity  penetrate  by  degrees  into  pagan  laws  and  institu- 
tions, until  its  reign  becomes  universal  and  secure  under  the 
glorious  sceptre  of  Charlemagne.  We  see  the  barbarous  na- 
tions, under  the  benign  influence  of  the  Gospel,  bringing  forth 
a  new  civilization  and  a  new  empire,  whose  growth  and  fruits 
are  admirably  described  in  the  ch  sing  studies,  entitled  The 
Churchy  The  State^  The  Schools.  With  Charlemagne  the  era 
of  barbarism  ceases,  a  new  era  begins,  and  a  new  society  is 
established. 
y/  Ozanam  brings  out  the  mission  of  the  Irish  race  in  striking 
relief : 

"  The  monastic  people  of  the  barbarous  ages,  the  missionary  people  destined 
to  cany  tlie  liglit  of  faith  and  science  into  the  gathering  darkness  of  the  West, 
are  a  people  whose  sufferings  are  better  known  to  us  than  their  services,  and 
whose  marvellous  vocation  we  have  not  sufficiently  studied — the  Irish."* 

The  historians  of  modern  civilization  are  apt  to  trace  it  ex- 
clusively to  the  decay  of  the  Empire  and  the  invasion  of  the 
Teutonic  races,  overlooking  the  fact  that  the  Romans  were 

*  Etudes  Ger.,  vol.  ii.  p.  iia. 


Life  and  iVorks  of  Frederic  Oza7iam.  305 

coming  to  an  end  just  as  the  Germans  were  beginning,  and 
that  they  were  too  old  and  worn-out  to  complete  the  educa- 
tion of  the  on-coming  race,  so  that  it  required  a  new  genera- 
tion to  continue  the  chain  and  rejoin  the  links.  This,  Oza- 
nam  says,  was  the  mission  of  the  Celtic  race,  which  he  shows 
us  at  an  early  period  spreading  itself  like  a  fertile  seed  over 
part  of  Germany,  of  Italy,  Spain,  Gaul,  Brittany,  and  Ireland. 
The  church  of  Gaul  soon  cast  the  nets  of  her  proselytism  over 
the  rest  of  the  Celtic  nations;  and  while  early  in  the  fifth 
century  she  was  sending  St.  Loup  and  St.  Germain  to  appease 
the  troubles  excited  by  the  Pelagian  heresy  in  Brittany,  she 
was  bidding  a  Gallo-Roman,  named  Patricius,  found  the 
monastic  life  in  the  cloisters  of  Marmoutiers  and  Lerins, 
and  then  go  forth  and  bear  the  tidings  of  the  Gospel  to  the 
Irish. 

♦'  This  virgin  island,  on  whose  soil  no  proconsul  had  ever  set  his  foot,  which 
had  known  neither  the  exactions  of  Rome  nor  its  orgies,  was  also  the  only 
spot  in  the  whole  world  of  which  the  Gospel  took  possession  without  resist- 
ance and  without  bloodshed.  The  first  fer\-ors  of  the  faith  which  in  other 
lands  drove  the  Christians  to  martyrdom  drew  the  neophytes  of  Ireland  into 
monasteries,  and  St.  Patrick  rejoiced  to  see  the  sons  and  daughters  of  the 
chiefs  of  the  clans  ranging  themselves  under  the  rule  of  the  cloister  in  such 
numbers  that  he  could  no  longer  count  them.  .  .  .  Christianity,  which  has 
always  dealt  tenderly  with  converted  nations,  which  spared  the  temples  of 
Italy  and  Greece,  did  not  lay  the  axe  to  the  sacred  woods  of  the  Irish.  The 
grave  genius  of  the  Druids  passed,  with  their  science  and  their  traditions,  to 
be  purified  by  the  monks.  The  nuns  of  Kildare  kept  up  near  the  church  of  St. 
Bridget  a  sacred  fire,  which  was  still  alight  there  after  six  hundred  years.  .  .  . 
St.  Columba,  ou  a  rock  of  the  Hebrides,  lived  in  familiar  intercourse  with  the 
wild  beasts  of  the  desert ;  and  when  St.  Kevin  prayed  with  outstretched  arms, 
we  are  told  that  the  birds  came  and  laid  their  eggs  in  his  palms.  The  bards 
lured  the  people  after  them  to  the  monasteries,  taking  with  them  the  national 
harp,  the  songs  and  memories  of  the  land  ;  saints  sought  relaxation  from 
their  austere  labors  in  listening  to  the  flute-players  ;  the  poetry  of  the  nation 
finds  a  vent  in  its  legends ;  and  while  the  monk  is  enclosed  within  the  narrow 
walls  of  his  cell,  his  imagination  wanders  over  the  seas  with  St.  Brendan,  or 
roams  through  the  invisible  world  on  the  footsteps  of  St.  Patrick."* 

AVe  must  refrain  from  further  quotations,  difficult  as  it  is  to 
resist  giving  some  of  those  delicate  legends  which  Ozanam 

*  EtiuUt  Gtr^  vol.  ii.  p.  114. 


304  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozaiiam, 

delights  in,  and  interweaves  so  gracefully  with  the  austere  and 
learned  narrative  of  these  ancient  island  saints. 

We  lay  down  these  two  volumes,  unable  to  decide  which 
most  commands  our  admiration,  the  eloquence  of  the  writer 
or  the  erudition  of  the  historian.  It  is  rare  to  find  the  two 
qualities  united  in  one  man ;  the  slow,  patient  research  and 
analysis  of  the  savant  are  apt  to  prove  fatal  to  the  ^laii,  the  in- 
spired impulse,  of  the  orator;  for  we  must  recollect  that  these 
glowing  chapters  were  lectures  delivered  spontaneously ;  but 
Ozanam  possessed  the  twofold  power  of  oratory  and  erudition. 
"  One  was  as  natural  to  him  as  the  other  was,"  says  Lacor- 
daire,  a  competent  judge  of  both ;  "  he  was  great  when  stir- 
ring up  the  dust  around  him  with  the  miner's  mattock,  and 
great  in  the  full  light  of  day,  with  the  direct  glance  of  the 
mind's  eye.  It  was  this  that  composed  his  moral  nature — a 
mixture  of  solidity  with  young  and  ardent  enthusiasm."  * 

The  following  letter  may  be  appropriately  inserted  here: 

COUNT  DE  MONTALEMBERT  TO  MADAME  OZANAM. 

**  La  Roche  en  Breny,  C6te  d'Or, 
Z2d  Dec,  1855. 

"How  kind  of  you,  Madame,  to  have  thought  of  sending  me  that  precious 
volume  !  I  should  certainly  have  procured  it  myself,  but  coming  from  your 
hand  it  is  infinitely  more  precious.  I  shall  have  it  bound,  and  keep  it  by  me 
against  the  return  of  those  sufferings  which  I  earnestly  wish  I  may  learn  to 
bear  with  the  patience  and  fervent  piety  of  your  husband.  I  noticed  with 
pleasure  and  with  tender  emotion  some  letters  of  his  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Ltvre  des  Malades.  One  longs  for  more  of  them,  for  it  was  there  that  his 
soul  poured  itself  out  fully.  .  .  I  was  all  the  more  touched  by  this  souvenir 
that  has  come  to  me  so  unexpectedly  from  you  and  from  kim^  because  I  have 
been  living  in  community  of  studies  and  thought  with  him  for  some  time 
past.  I  have  a  volume  of  the  Etudes  Germaniques  always  open  before  me, 
and  I  am  forced  to  acknowledge,  with  a  pardonable  sort  of  despair,  that  M. 
Ozanam  has  left  absolutely'^iothing  to  be  said  by  those  who  come  after  him  to 
glean  in  the  fields  where  he  has  reaped.  The  affection  that  I  have  always 
borne  him,  and  my  reverence  {culte)  for  his  blessed  and  noble  memory,  can 
alone  console  me  for  being  thus  always  left  so  far  behind  by  his  eloquence  and 
his  loyal  erudition. 

"  My  wife  wishes  me  to  remember  her  specially  to  you.     Your  image  is 

•  Frederic  Osanam,  p.  45. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  305 

constantly  present  to  us,  and  your  name  recurs  continually  in  our  conver- 
sations. 

"  Believe  in  the  respectful  attachment  of  your  most  humble  servant, 

"Charles  de  Montalembert." 

We  have  now  to  speak  of  Da7iie  et  la  Philosophie  Catholique 
autreizieme  siede.  The  prestige  of  Dante's  name  is  so  subhme 
that  it  requires  some  courage  to  approach  it,  even  under  the 
protection  of  an  authorized  guide;  yet  it  is  impossible,  in  the 
most  cursory  notice  of  Ozanams  works,  to  pass  by  in  silence 
that  which  is  perhaps  the  most  widely  known  of  them  all. 

Our  readers  have  probably  not  forgotten  the  profound  im- 
pression he  received  when,  on  standing  for  the  first  time  in 
those  chambers  of  Raphael  which  he  designates  "  the  sanc- 
tuary of  Christian  art,"  he  beheld  amidst  the  doctors  of  theo- 
logy, in  the  '*  Dispute  oi  the  Blessed  Sacrament,"  a  figure 
"  remarkable  by  its  originality,  a  head  crowned,  not  with  the 
mitre  or  the  tiara,  but  with  a  wreath  of  laurel,  yet  noble  and 
austere  withal,  and  nowise  unworthy  of  that  high  company  " 

Why  is  Dante  Alighieri  placed  side  by  side  with  the  angel 
of  the  schools,  with  St.  Bonaventure  Savonarola,  and  other 
accredited  teachers  of  the  divine  science  ?  This  sudden 
enquiry  awakes  in  the  mind  of  the  boy  tourist  a  reverent  curi- 
osity which  deepened  with  years,  and  gives  us  the  true  motive 
and  immediate  scope  of  the  present  work. 

No  book  written  by  man  has  begot  so  much  commentary 
as  that  immortal  song  which  Gioberti  *  styles  "  the  human 
Bible  of  modern  society  " ;  from  the  fourteenth  century  to  the 
nineteenth  it  flows  on  in  an  unbroken  stream,  each  age  bring- 
ing its  peculiar  character  and  spirit  to  the  task  of  criticising, 
interpreting,  elucidating  ;  and  yet  Cesare  Balbo,  the  latest 
and  most  admired  of  Dante's  biographers,  declares  that  a 
commentary  of  the  Divina  Commedia  remains  yet  to  be 
written.  Nor  will  this  assertion  seem  exaggerated  if  we  come 
to  consider  the  extraordinary  contradictions  that  exist  amongst 
all  those  that  have  yet  appeared. 

•  Dtl  Prtmato,  p.  378 


3g6  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

The  immense  family  of  Dantesque  commentators  may  be 
classed  in  four  schools,  the  ascetic  and  the  political,  thesqhool 
of  the  grammarians,  and  the  historians.  The  ascetics  discover 
in  the  allegories  a  whole  series  of  mystical  and  theological 
doctrines.  This  school  comprises  nearly  all  the  commenta- 
tors from  Dante's  own  contemporaries  down  to  Cristoforo 
Landino  in  1457. 

The  political  school  includes  those  who  regard  the  emanci- 
pation of  Florence  and  of  all  Italy  from  papal  supremacy  as 
the  main  object  of  the  poem. 

The  grammarians  and  the  historians  split  hairs  over  the 
interpretation  of  the  letter,  and  contest  the  chronological 
accuracy  of  the  facts.  Each  school  contains  a  principle  ot 
truth  and  a  principle  of  error.  Of  truth,  inasmuch  as  these 
four  elements  all  exist  in  the  poem,  but  are  so  harmoniously 
balanced,  and  grouped  round  thq,  central  idea  in  such  exqui- 
site symmetry,  that  we  may  apply  to  the  Divina  Commedia 
those  words  of  Dante  describing  the  beauty  of  Beatrice, 
"...  sola  il  suo  Fattore  tutta  la  goda."  Of  error,  because, 
instead  of  viewing  these  elements  as  distinct,  yet  harmonizing 
in  a  perfect  whole,  each  commentator  detaches  one  from  the 
rest,  and  works  it  to  excess,  neglecting  the  others,  and  thus 
straying  from  the  lines  of  full  and  accurate  interpretation. 

The  ascetic  school  slips  into  mystic  subtleties  that  end  by 
clouding  the  poem,  effacing  the  true  Dantesque  idea,  and  re- 
placing it  by  neo-Platonism.  Again,  we  see  the  purely  political 
allegories  strained  and  tortured  to  express  the  jargon  of  free- 
masonry, of  seers  and  humanitarians  ;  while  men  of  letters 
and  students  of  history,  by  attending  exclusively  to  the  literal 
interpretation,  open  the  door  to  the  cavilling  of  the  sophists, 
and  by  pushing  chronological  research  too  far  reduce  the 
poem  to  a  chronicle. 

Balbo,  therefore,  is  justified  in  saying  that  the  worthy  com- 
mentator of  Dante  is  yet  to  come,  the  one  who,  by  embracing 
in  their  proper  proportions  these  diverse  but  not  heterogene- 
<3us  elements,  will  restore  to  th§  Qommedia  that  unity  of  con 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  307 

ception  whicli  has  hitherto  been  so  grievously  misuinierstood. 
Ozanam  did  not  aspire  to  so  elaborate  a  work.  His  ciiief  aim 
was  to  reveal  to  us  in  Dante  the  theologian  and  philosopher, 
the  disciple  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  and  Niger  de  Brabant. 

After  having  been  the  most  glorified  of  men,  venerated  and 
exalted  for  centuries,  Dante  was  destined,  like  all  human 
celebrities,  to  experience  the  fickleness  of  human  glory.  Phi- 
losophy had  been  the  master  passion  of  his  mind,  and  yet  the 
work  which  most  victoriously  embodied  this,  the  book  to 
which  he  sacrificed  his  life,  and  which,  as  he  pathetically  puts 
it,  "  made  me  lean  for  years,"  had  come  down  to  us  after  sbc 
hundred  years  shorn  of  the  greater  portion  of  that  philoso- 
phical interest  which  its  author  prized  above  every  other. 

This  was  the  task  which  Ozanam  set  himself  to  accomplish : 
to  reconstitute  this  mutilated  portion  of  the  poet's  glory,  and 
rehabilitate  that  formula  of  starry  and  translucent  truth  with 
which,  guided  by  his  seeing  eye,  the  Florentine  penetrated 
into  the  inmost  mystery  of  life  and  human  destiny. 

Nothing  in  the  Middle  Ages  has  been  more  calumniated 
than  their  philosophy.  It  is  represented  as  turning  in  a 
groove  of  systems,  quarrels,  and  sterile  speculations,  having 
for  its  instrument  a  barbarous,  indocile,  and  pedantic  lan- 
guage. Dante  stands  forth  to  vindicate  this  maligned  period, 
and  he  does  so  in  an  idiom  intelligible  to  women  and  chil- 
dren. He  takes  up  one  of  these  semi-barbarous  mediaeval 
tongues  and  shows  us  what  can  be  done  with  it;  in  his  hands 
the  Italian  vocabulary  expands  to  the  breadth  of  his  vast 
comprehension ;  it  grows  strong  with  his  strength,  sweeter 
with  his  sweetness,  its  mellifluous  tones  borrow  a  more  liquid 
music  when  they  become  the  medium  of  his  inspired  thoughts. 

The  secret  of  Dante's  immortality  lies  in  that  union  of  phi- 
losophy with  poetry  which  his  sublime  song  presents ;  the 
Divina  Commedia  addresses  itself  to  doctors,  princes,  souls  of 
every  class  and  in  every  age,  and  all  listen  entranced,  "  un- 
derstanding every  one  in  his  own  tongue."  A  poem  which 
embraces   such  an  illimitable  range   present?  a  horizon  too 


3o8  Life  and  Works  of  Ftederic  Ozanam. 

vast  for  any  one  critic  to  span.  And  Ozanam  wisely  confines 
himself  to  one  aspect  of  the  work,  that  which,  he  says,  "  is 
the  least  cultivated,  but  perhaps  the  most  fertile."  But  to  do 
even  this  thoroughly  involved  an  immense  toil.  A  philoso- 
phical system  is  not  an  isolated  fact,  "  it  is  the  produce  of  the 
concurrence  of  all  the  faculties  of  the  soul,  and  these  faculties, 
in  their  turn,  obey  the  anterior  education  they  have  received, 
and  external  impulses.  It  is  therefore  necessary  to  begin  by 
studying  the  general  aspect  of  Dante's  epoch,  the  phases  of 
contemporary  scholasticism,  the  special  characteristics  of  the 
Italian  school  to  which  he  belongs,  the  studies  and  vicissitudes 
that  fill  his  life,  and  the  effect  which  these  united  causes  must 
have  exercised  on  his  destinies."  * 

The  answer  to  these  enquiries  would  involve  the  solution  of 
endless  historical  questions.  It  would  be  necessary,  in  order 
to  sift  the  various  mediaeval  conceptions  grouped  together  in 
the  Divina  Commedia^  to  trace  them  up  to  their  original 
sources,  starting  from  the  Eastern  sanctuaries,  and  proceeding 
through  the  Arab,  the  Alexandrine,  the  Latin,  the  Greek,  and 
the  Christian  schools ;  but  as  no  individual  life  would  suffice 
for  such  a  process,  Ozanam  takes  only  a  rapid  glance  along 
the  vista;  like  Dante  before  entering  the  circle,  he  looks  and 
passes  on,  granting  but  a  brief  interview  to  each  period, 
school,  and  personage.  But  with  Beatrice  he  lingers  ;  before 
this  sweet  conception,  this  heavenly  light  whom  all  surround- 
ing beams  irradiate,  who  combines  the  very  essence  of  the 
mystic  song,  its.  divine  philosophy  and  its  purest  earthly  inte- 
rest, the  enthusiasm  of  the  commentator  gives  itself  free  vent 
and  rises  to  ecstasy.  Others  have  written  wisely  and  beauti- 
fully about  Beatrice,  have  analyzed,  exalted,  explained  her ; 
but  Ozanam,  like  Dante  himself,  tunes  his  lyre  to  a  seraphic 
key,  and  sings  like  one  who  worships.  Avoiding  the  two 
rocks  on  which  his  predecessors  have  split — one  school  re- 
garding her  as  a  purely  abstract  symbol,  the  other  as  nothing 
but  an  earthly  reality — he  shows  us  Dante  passionately  loving 

•  DuHtc  tt  la  Phil  Catk.,  Introd.  p.  63. 


Life  and  Wot  ks  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  309 

the  woman,  longing  for  her,  losing  her ;  we  see  his  life  irre- 
parably impoverished  by  the  loss  of  this  ideal  which  it  never 
possessed,  but  which  was  destined  to  color  it  as  no  reality 
could  have  done ;  we  see  him  pass  from  sombre  despair  to 
exulting  adoration,  and  rise  up  from  his  sorrow  to  sing  of  her 
"  as  no  man  has  yet  sung  of  woman  "  \  we  behold  the  trans- 
formation of  the  reality  into  the  symbol,  we  see  the  mystic 
waters  rise  from  their  source  at  the  crystal  throne,  we  watch 
them  flow  to  meet  the  stream  of  human  tears,  where,  blend- 
ing in  one  translucent  wave,  they  bear  Beatrice  from  our 
sight,  until  we  behold  her  emerge  on  the  golden  heights  of 
vision,  as  the  heavenly  lady  who  will  guide  her  votary  through 
the  effulgent  circles  of  Paradise. 

It  is  difficult  to  see  how  the  most  uninitiated  student  of 
Dante  can  fail  to  recognize  this  twofold  character  of  the 
poem,  or  to  understand  how  any  controversy  could  have 
arisen  about  it  in  the  face  of  his  own  assertion.  "  The  sense 
of  this  work,"  he  says  in  the  curious  letter  where  he  dedicates 
//  Paradiso  to  Can  Grande,  "  is  not  simple,  but  multiform. 
There  is  first  the  literal  sense,  and  then  the  sense  hidden 
under  the  letter."  It  would  seem  that  he  attached  more 
weight  to  the  real  than  the  allegorical  sense,  for  he  adds  in 
the  same  letter :  "  The  aim  of  my  work,  the  aim  of  the  whole 
and  every  part  of  it,  is  to  rescue  the  living  from  their  misery 
and  guide  them  to  happiness,  not  only  in  the  next  world,  but 
in  this." 

Yet  in  spite  of  this  authority,  the  multiform  character  of  the 
poem  was  denied  by  commentators  up  to  a  very  recent  period. 
Ozanam  has,  it  is  generally  admitted,  thrown  more  light  on  its 
complex  meanings  than  any  other  modern  critic.  He  sees, 
in  the  poet's  wondrous  capacity  for  love,  the  secret  of  his  true 
poetic  mission,  and  shows  us  how  this  love,  its  growth  in 
sorrow  and  supreme  development  in  worship,  is  the  experi- 
ence that  was  needed  to  work  out  his  destiny  to  its  fulfilment. 

•'According  to  the  laws  that  rule  the  spiritual  world,  the  attraction  of  one 
soul  is  needed  to  ejevate  another.    This  attraction  wc  call  love  \  in  the  language 


3IO  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

of  philosophy  it  is  also  called  friendship ;  in  that  of  Christianity  it  is  called 
charity,  Dante  was  not  to  escape  the  common  law.  At  nine  years  of  age — ■ 
that  is  to  say,  at  an  age  whose  innocence  admits  of  no  impure  suspicion — he 
meets  at  a  family  festival  a  child  full  of  nobleness  and  grace.  This  sight 
awakes  in  him  an  affection  which  has  no  name  on  earth,  and  which  he  pre- 
serves tender  and  chaste  during  the  perilous  season  of  youth  ;  dreams  wliere 
Beatrice  appears  to  him  in  her  radiant  beauty;  an  indescribable  yearning 
to  find  himself  in  her  pathway ;  a  bow,  the  merest  inclination  of  the  head — 
in  such  things  as  these  did  he  place  his  happiness.  He  was  a  prey  to 
fears  and  hopes,  to  joys  and  sadnesses  that  exercised  his  sensibility  and  puri- 
fied it  to  the  most  extreme  delicacy,  disengaging  it  by  degrees  from  all 
vulgar  habits  and  sohcitudes ;  but,  above  all,  when  Beatrice  quitted  this  world 
in  the  bloom  of  her  youth,  his  thoughts  followed  her  to  that  invisible  world  of 
which  she  had  become  an  inhabitant,  and  he  delighted  to  adorn  her  with  the 
choicest  flowers  of  immortality ;  he  surrounded  her  with  the  canticles  of  the 
angels,  he  seated  her  on  the  highest  steps  of  the  throne  of  God,  he  forgot  her 
death  in  the  contemplation  of  this  glorious  transfiguration."* 

Grief  drove  Dante  to  seek  consolation  in  the  writings  ot 
Cicero  and  Boethius,  St.  Augustine,  St.  Gregory  the  Great,  St. 
Thomas  Aquinas,  St.  Bernard,  Richard  of  St.  Victor,  and 
these  noble  masters  amply  rewarded  his  patient  study.  It 
was  not  long  before  philosophy  became  the  mistress  of  his 
soul,  ruling  it  as  Beatrice  had  done,  but  witli  austerer  sway. 
In  order  to  perfect  himself  in  her  service  he  travelled  in  pur- 
suit of  science  to  all  the  great  universities  of  the  day.  The 
[nferno'f  and  Paradiso\  bear  traces  of  an  itinerary  which, 
passing  through  Aries,  Paris,  Bruges,  and  London,  would 
seem  to  land  the  illustrious  student  at  Oxford.  Ozanam  re- 
frains from  pronouncing  on  its  accuracy,  but  holds  it  for  cer- 

*  Dante  et  la  Phil.  Cath.,p.  119. 

It  is  generally  assumed  that  grief  at  Beatrice's  death  was  what  first  awoke  Dante's  poetic 
genius.  He  himself  would  seem  to  prove  that  it  was  despair  at  her  marriage.  That  morning, 
after  he  met  her  in  the  streets  of  Florence,  robed  in  white,  and  accompanied  by  women  older 
than  herself— clearly  on  her  way  as  a  betrothed  bride  to  the  church— and  when  she  spoke  to  him 
those  words  which  filled  him  with  such  joy  that  he  thought  he  had  "  reached  the  limits  of 
beatitude,"  he  went  home  aud  had  that  vision  where  he  sees  her  held  up  in  the  arms  of  a  man, 
who  awakes  her  with  the  words,  "Ego  Dominus  tuus,"  and,  after  constraining  her  to  eat  the 
burning  heart,  bears  her  away,  "  his  joy  being  suddenly  changed  to  bitter  lamentation."  Dante 
at  once  sits  down  and  writes  his  Jirsl  sonnet,  which  he  sends  round  to  several  friends,  asking 
them  to  interpret  it ;  but  they  all  fail  to  do  so,  as  he  tells  us  in  the  Viia  Nuova. 

We  are  indebted  for  this  idea — entirely  original,  as  far  as  we  are  aware,  though  so  trans- 
parently suggestive— to  the  unpublished  notes  of  an  accomplished  Italian  scholar,  Mr.  Augustus 
Craven. 

t  Inferno,  ix.  38  ;  xii.  40  ;  xv.  2,  }  Faradis",  x.  47i  etc, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  311 

tain  that  Dante  passed  some  time  in  Paris,  where,  in  company 
with  the  common  herd  of  students,  he  attended  the  lectures 
of  the  learned  Sigier  in  the  Rue.Fouarre;  but  here,  as  in  his 
native  land,  science  closed  her  gates  against  him.  He  gained 
the  highest  grades,  but  he  was  not  received  into  the  Academy, 
*'  because  he  was  too  poor  to  pay  the  fees."  So  he  wended 
his  way  back  to  Italy,  and  at  Verona  sustained  a  thesis  "  on 
the  elements  of  fire  and  water"  with  an  /ciat  which,  mayhap 
consoled  him  a  little  for  the  loss  of  academical  honors.  One 
year  later  he  died,  and  Guide  Novello  placed  a  crown  of 
laurels  on  his  tomb.  Thus  we  see  in  Dante  three  distinct 
lives,  each  complete  in  its  sphere — the  citizen,  the  poet,  and 
the  philosopher.  We  see  him  in  possession  of  "  those  three 
faculties,"  says  Ozanam,  *'  which,  united  in  certain  propor- 
tions, compose  genius — intelligence  to  perceive,  imagination 
to  idealize,  will  to  realize." 

It  would  seem  but  too  true  that  the  pure  memory  of  Bea- 
trice failed  to  preserve  worthy  of  it  the  life  where  it  was  so 
magnificently  enshrined.  Ozanam,  with  all  his  reverence  for 
Dante,  does  not  attempt  to  palliate  his  faults,  but  he  alleges 
deprecatingly,  "  They  have  a  wonderful  secret  for  making  you 
overlook  them — repentance.  In  the  thirteenth  century,  the 
art,  so  common  nowadays,  of  legitimizing  vice  by  complaisant 
doctrines  was  little  known.  Sooner  or  later  men  came  to  seek 
in  religion  that  grace  of  expiation  of  which  she  is  the  immortal 
dispenser."  Dante  comes  before  us  in  this  penitential  atti- 
tude, as  he  himself  describes  it,  " with  downcast  e}e.s,  like  a 
child  that  confesses  its  fault,"  avowing  in  the  face  of  all  future 
generations  the  follies  of  his  youth.  The  Vita  Nuova  is  the 
naive  confession  of  his  early  years ;  the  two  books  de  Vulgari 
Eloquenfid  are  a  philological  apologia  of  the  despised  idiom 
which  he  used  as  the  instrument  of  his  finest  inspirations;  the 
Convito  is  the  outpouring  of  those  philosophical  doctrines  which 
he  had  gathered  from  the  sages  of  antiquity  and  modern  doc- 
tors. Then  follows  the  work  of  which  these  are  the  heralds 
and  the  preparation,  the  Divina  Commedia,     But  earth  wa? 


312  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

too  narrow  a  stage  for  this  vast,  unfathomable  poem.  True 
poetry  is  an  intuition  of  the  infinite,  a  perception  of  God  in 
creation,  a  divine  instinct  reaching  to  the  Hfe  beyond  life,  up- 
hfting  the  soul  with  a  sweet  and  powerful  might  of  inspiration, 
and  compelling  it  to  seek  its  abiding-place  in  that  boundless 
realm  which  is  the  natural  home  of  immortality.  In  every 
remote  period,  and  amongst  the  rudest  tribes,  we  see  this  in- 
stinct guiding  the  literature  of  mankind,  seeking  in  the  invisi- 
ble a  refuge  for  the  noblest  human  needs,  invoking  the  super- 
natural, though  it  be  but  in  horror,  as  an  instinctive  canon  of 
poetic  art.  The  Divina  Commedia  is  the  grandest  affirmation 
of  this  truth  which  human  genius  has  yet  produced.  Dante's 
eagle  flight  chafed  within  the  limits  of  time  and  space;  he 
passed  beyond  them  through  the  gates  of  death,  and  placed 
his  poem  in  the  infinite.  From  this  stupendous  stage  he  con- 
templates the  world,  he  sees  the  nations  like  the  tribes  of  old, 
coming  up  one  by  one,  an  endless  procession,  to  the  judgment- 
seat;  he  passes  sentence  on  the  rulers  and  the  peoples,  justly 
but  pitilessly ;  he  uses  without  mercy  that  terrible  scourge  of  • 
satire  which  the  prophets  wielded  when  the  world  was  young; 
he  takes  up  Jacopone's  rod,  and  in  his  hand  it  becomes  a  ser- 
pent whose  bite  stings  like  fire.  Science  serves  him  as  a 
docile  handmaiden ;  his  seer's  eye  dimly  descries  in  coming 
years  the  worlds  that  Newton  and  Columbus  are  to  discover. 
But  his  Muse  is  led  by  a  loftier  star  than  physical  science  or 
philosophy.  Religion  and  sorrow  are  his  guides;  these  lead 
him  into  the  mystic  sanctuary  where  only  they  may  enter;  they 
initiate  him  into  the  cause  of  existence,  the  sanction  of  the  de- 
crees of  conscience,  the  germ  of  future  misery  and  happiness 
contained  in  our  merits  or  demerits  here  below,  the  final  re- 
sult of  human  actions.  The  study  of  human  actions  becomes 
naturally  thenceforth  the  one  whose  interest  absorbs  him  above 
all  others,  though  he  interweaves  it  with  the  most  varied  and 
seemingly  irrelevant  ones.  Standing  beyond  death  he  con- 
ceives a  plan  of  the  philosophy  of  life,  of  universal  science. 
But  though  Dante's  thoughts  were  steadily  centred  in  death, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  313 

they  bear  no  traces  of  that  egotism  which,  as  Ozanam  says, 
"  hides  itself  so  frequently  under  the  appearance  of  melan- 
choly." Strong  human  sympathies  still  bound  him  to  the 
great  heart  of  humanity,  and  drew  him  back  to  the  scenes 
where  the  fiery  passions  of  his  youth  had  found  an  outlet. 
Ozanam  feels  so  strongly  this  sympathetic  current  flowing 
from  Dante's  soul  that  he  claims  him  as  the  prophet  of  de- 
mocracy and  of  the  revolution  of  modern  society. 

"  Doubtless,"  he  says,  '*  Dante  borrowed  from  the  publicists  of  his  day  many 
of  the  arg;uments  on  which  he  supports  the  monarchy  of  the  Holy  Empire. 
But  the  Empire,  as  he  conceives  it,  is  no  longer  that  of  Charlemagrie.  .  .  . 
It  is  a  new  conception,  reaching  to  two  great  things;  on  one  side  to  the 
primitive  Roman  Empire,  where  the  prince  clothed  with  the  tribune's  power 
represents  in  his  triumph  the  plebeians  conquering  the  patricians  ;  on  the  other, 
the  French  monarchy  raising  itself  by  alliance  with  the  communes  on  the 
ruins  of  the  nobihty.  The  depositary  of  power,  even  under  the  name  of 
Caesar,  with  the  imperial  diadem  on  his  brow,  is  in  Dante's  eyes  no  more  than 
the  immediate  agent  of  the  multitude,  the  level  which  renders  all  heads  equal. 
Amongst  all  privileges,  none  is  so  odious  to  him  as  that  of  birth  ;  he  shakes 
feudalism  to  its  base,  and  his  rude  polemics,  in  attacking  hereditary  honors,  do 
not  spare  hereditary  possessions.  After  seeking  for  the  regenerating  principles 
of  a  social  philosophy  in  the  highest  regions  of  moral  theolc^y,  he  follows  out 
their  deductions  relentlessly  to  the  most  extreme  and  impracticable  democratic 
maxims."* 

Rit  if  Ozanam  proclaims  Dante  the  precursor  of  modem 
ideas,  from  his  having  been  the  first  who  gave  a  moral,  politi- 
cal, and  universal  direction  to  the  philosophical  sciences,  he  is 
careful  to  exonerate  him  from  complicity  in  the  excesses  of 
which  our  days  are  witness. 

"  He  did  not  deify  humanity  by  representing  it  as  self-suffidng,  with  no  light 
but  reason,  no  rule  but  its  own  will.  .  .  .  He  saw  that  it  was  not  all  here  be- 
low, where  it  passes,  as  it  were,  in  swarms ;  he  went  first  of  all  to  seek  it  at 
the  end  of  the  journey,  where  the  innumerable  pilgrims  of  life  are  gathered  for 
ever.  It  has  been  said  of  Bossuet  that,  with  the  rod  of  Moses  in  his  hand,  he 
drove  the  generations  to  the  tomb.  It  may  be  said  of  Dante  that  he  awaits 
them  there  with  the  scales  of  the  last  judgment.  Leaning  on  the  truths  which 
they  should  have  believed,  and  the  justice  Ihey  should  have  served,  he  weighs 
their  works  in  the  balance  oi  eternity.  .  ,  .  Thus,  with  thfe  idea  Ot  an  eternal 
destiny,  piorality  re-enters  into  history  ;  humanity,  Jiumiliated  Under  the  iaw 

•  Panic  iii.  p.  362, 


314  -^^  <^nd  Works  of  Frederic  Ozananh 

of  death,  rises  up  with  the  law  of  duty,  and  if  we  deny  it  the  honors  of  an 
arrogant  apotheosis,  we  spare  it  the  opprobrium  of  a  brutish  fatalism."* 

After  measuring  the  various  points  of  contrast  and  analogy 
which  exist  between  Dante's  philosophy  and  other  systems, 
jancient  and  modern,  Ozanam  comes  to  the  question  which 
has  engaged  all  the  commentators  of  the  poet  for  three  centuries 
— his  orthodoxy. 

"Protestantism,"  he  says,  "at  its  cradle  felt  the  necessity  of  creating  a 
genealogy  which  should  link  it  to  the  Apostolic  times,  and  justify  in  it  the 
accomplishment  of  those  promises  of  infallibility  which  the  Saviour  has  left  to 
His  church.  ...  It  is  not  exacting  in  the  matter  of  proofs  ;  a  few  embittered 
words,  dropped  from  the  pen  of  a  celebrated  man  on  contemporary  abuses, 
suffice  to  place  him  at  once  in  the  catalogue  of  these  pretended  witnesses  of  the 
truth.  Dante  could  not  escape  this  posthumous  honor.  .  .  .  Various  pas- 
sages of  his  poem,  ingeniously  tortured,  appeared,  it  was  alleged,  to  contain 
derisive  allusions  to  the  holiest  mysteries  of  the  Catholic  liturgy"  {JPar. 
xxxiii.  12). 

It  was  not  unnatural  that  English  lovers  of  Dante  should 
seize  with  avidity  anything  that  struck  them  as  evidence  of 
his  Protestant  affinities  ;  but  if  the  Protestants  of  the  sixteenth 
century  tried  to  claim  him  for  their  own,  it  was  reserved  to 
the  zealots  of  the  nineteenth  to  make  him  out  a  freemason; 
M.  Aroux  has  written  a  learned  treatise  on  the  subject,  and 
proved  the  charge  of  freemasonry  to  his  own  satisfaction. 
The  honor  of  originating  the  idea  does  not,  however,  rest 
with  him.  Ozanam  relates  how,  when,  emancipated  from  the 
fatal  influence  of  the  Seicentisti,  Italian  literature  returned  to 
worthier  traditions,  the  worship  of  the  old  poets  of  the  father- 
land was  turned  to  account  by  the  secret  societies,  who  grafted 
their  religion  and  political  theories  upon  it. 

"  And  in  our  own  day,  when  the  heads  of  the  conquered  party,  worthy  of  all 
respectful  pity,  sought  refuge  in  England,  the  need  of  something  to  while 
away  the  dreary  leisure  of  exile,  perhaps  also  the  desire  to  recognize  in  some 
way  Protestant  hospitality,  inspired  the  new  system  proposed  by  Ugo  Foscolo, 
and  supported  by  M.  Rossetti,  not  without  a  vast  display  of  science  and  im- 
agination," f 

Witnesses,  however,  were  forthcoming  to  avenge  Dante  and 

•  Partie  iii.  p.  3^.  \  DatiUa  Phil.  Calk.,  p.  37a 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  315 

rescue  him  from  these  profanations.  Foscolo  has  found 
learned  contradictors  in  Italy  (Cesare  Balbo  and  the  editors 
of  the  Milanese  edition  of  the  Convito)^  and  Schlegel,  the 
oracle  of  German  criticism,  has  refuted  exhaustively  the  para- 
doxes of  Rossetti. 

The  fierce  invectives  with  which  the  exiled  Florentine  pur- 
sues the  Roman  Court  and  certain  Popes  have  furnished  a 
ground  of  suspicion  against  him  to  many;  but  Ozanam 
answers  this  charge  by  the  obvious  Catholic  argument  that 
Papal  impeccability  is  a  totally  distinct  matter  from  Papal  in^ 
fallibility.  St.  Bernard  and  St.  Thomas  of  Canterbury  head 
the  list  of  canonized  saints  who  in  evil  days  stood  dauntlessly 
forth  to  denounce  the  iniquities  of  Popes  and  the  corruption 
of  their  courts.  If  Dante  overstepped  the  bounds  which  the 
filial  reverence  of  these  servants  of  the  Church  respected,  we 
must  remember  that  he  was  not  a  saint,  but  a  man  of  proud 
and  fiery  temperament,  swayed  by  strong  passions,  and  self- 
charged  with  a  mission  which  exacted  more  severity  than 
mildness.  Yet  his  violence,  even  in  its  fiercest  paroxysms,  is 
acquitted  of  the  slightest  stain  of  heresy  by  those  who  hold 
the  right  to  judge  it.  Catholicism  is  not  so  careless  of  its 
glories.  The  orthodoxy  of  Dante  was  defended  and  estab- 
lished by  no  less  an  authority  than  Bellarmine  in  the  seven- 
teenth century.  Three  Popes  accepted  the  dedication  of  the 
Divina  Commedia,  Paul  III.,  Pius  IV.,  Clement  XII.,  and  the 
Roman  edition  of  1791  was  sanctioned  by  the  same  supreme 
authority.  Even  in  the  poet's  lifetime,  the  shafts  he  levelled 
at  contemporary  corruption  and  abuses  laid  him  open  to  the 
charge  of  heresy,  and  an  ancient  tradition  tells  us  how  the 
Roman  Inquisition  dealt  with  it.  His  poem,  on  its  first  ap- 
pearance, was  rigorously  examined  by  the  doctors  of  theology, 
and  certain  Brothers- Minor,  noting  that  passage  where  St. 
Francis  meets  Dante,  and  asks  for  news  of  the  Franciscan 
order,  because  for  so  long  a  time  it  has  sent  nobody  to  heaven, 
took  offence,  and  summoned  the  satirist  before  the  Inquisi* 
tion. 


3i6  Life  and  Works  of  Fiedcric  Ozanam, 

"  Dante  appeared  before  the  judges  after  vespers,  and  begged  for  a  delay 
until  the  morrow,  that  he  might  draw  up  his  creed  in  writing,  consenting,  if  lie 
erred  in  any  point,  to  undergo  the  deserved  punishment.  He  watched  through 
the  night,  and  the  next  morning,  at  tierce,  presented  his  credo,  in  the  form  of 
a  poem  of  250  lines,  wherein  every  article  of  the  faith  was  separately  treated. 
The  Inquisitor  having  read  it  in  presence  of  his  counsel,  composed  of 
twelve  masters  in  theology,  dismissed  the  poet,  and  laughed  at  the  brethren, 
who  were  mightily  astonished  to  see  such  a  wonderful  composition  produced 
in  such  short  delay."  * 

This  record  is  to  be  seen  in  the  MS.  ion  of  Riccardiana 
at  Florence,  and,  even  admitting  a  doubt  of  its  veracity,  is 
invaluable  as  proving  what  the  contemporary  estimate  was  of 
Dante. 

Homer  has  been  styled  the  theologian  of  pagan  antiquity, 
and  Dante  has  been  called  in  turn  the  Homer  of  Christian 
times  ;  but  the  comparison,  if  it  glorifies  his  genius,  dishonors 
his  religion. 

♦'  The  blind  poet  of  Smyrna  has  been  justly  accused  of  lowering  the  gods  too 
near  to  man,  while  none  better  than  the  Florentine  has  known  how  to  elevate 
man  and  raise  him  up  towards  the  Godhead.  It  is  by  this,  by  the  purity,  by  the 
immaterial  character  of  his  symbolism,  by  the  infinite  breadth  of  his  concep- 
tion, that  he  leaves  so  far  behind  him  all  ancient  and  modem  poets,  and  above 
all  Milton  and  Klopstock.  If  we  would  raise  one  of  those  comparisons  which 
fix  in  the  memory  two  names  associated  to  recall  and  define  one  another,  we 
may  say,  and  it  will  be  the  risumi  of  this  study,  that  the  Divine  Comedy  is 
the  literary  and  philosophical  Somma  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  Dante  the  St. 
Thomas  of  poetry."  \ 

Thus  Ozanam  brings  us  back  to  the  point  from  which  he 
started,  to  that  fresco  of  Raphael's,  where  the  laurel-crowned 
figure,  standing  side  by  side  with  St.  Thomas,  first  awoke  his 
curiosity  and  prompted  the  research  which  was  to  solve  the 
puzzle.  How  far  he  has  succeeded  in  his  task  each  one  will 
pronounce  according  to  his  individual  judgment  and  sympa- 
thies. For  our  part,  we  confess  that  in  every  line  of  the 
august  epic  we  see  the  philosophy  of  Dante,  like  all  the  phi- 
losophy of  the  Middle  Ages,  ever  the  obedient  handmaiden  of 
theology.  Whether  he  penetrates  into  the  mysteries  of  Crea- 
tion, or  unravels  the  truths  taught  by  the  Church,  or  opens 

•  Ozanam's  Pursatorio,  p.  628  t  Dante  tt  Cath.  Phil.,  p.  381, 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Gzanam.  317 

the  inspired  writings  of  prophets  and  evangelists  to  gather  in 
their  divine  arcana  rules  and  types  and  a  voice  to  proclaim  their 
hidden  meanings,  we  see  ever  shining  on  his  page  the  serene 
and  dazzling  light  of  a  gigantic  human  intellect  illuminated 
by  faith.  His  poem  is  a  glorious  psalm  of  worship,  a  voice 
from  the  very  heart  of  humanity  chanting  the  praises  of  God; 
all  created  things,  ice  and  fire,  abysses  and  floods,  the  trees 
of  the  forest  and  the  stars  of  the  firmament,  are  called  in  to 
swell  the  chorus ;  all  through  creation,  in  nature  and  beyond 
it,  in  life  and  death,  from  the  happy  realms  above,  from  the 
desolate  Uccps  below,  the  voice  rin^s  loud  and  clear  like  the 
roar  of  many  waters  shouting  out  Hosannah  !  And  yet  in  the 
midst  of  the  glowing  visions  where  the  song  resounds,  througli 
mystic  dreams  and  fiery  shudderings  and  raptures  of  delight, 
we  never  lose  sight  of  the  entrancing  spectacle  of  a  human 
soul,  suffering,  heroic,  intense.  Whatever  be  the  scenes 
through  which  we  pass,  whether  they  be  full  of  tragic  satire, 
or  pathos  sweet  as  the  breath  of  heaven,  or  tenderness  pass- 
ing the  love  of  woman,  we  hear  the  chords  attuned  to  the 
?ame  dominant  key,  that  of  Dante's  sublime  and  powerful 
personality. 

Ozanam  has  left  us  only  an  unfinished  monument,  a  mere 
fragment  of  an  almost  infinite  design,  yet  there  are  few  writers 
whose  works  are  less  marred  by  a  sense  of  incompleteness. 
At  times,  no  doubt,  his  genius  rises  higher  than  at  others,  and 
flashes  out  in  its  maximum  of  power,  but  he  never  falls  below 
liis  habitual  level  of  finely-balanced  thought,  true  poetry,  and 
philosophy.  He  had  the  enthusiasm  of  a  real  poet,  but  it 
never  carried  away  his  judgment;  his  thought  was  always 
strong  enough  to  bear  the  utmost  weight  of  emotion  without 
being  obscured  or  defaced ;  his  style  is  finished  as  a  cameo, 
musical,  delicate,  and  masterly ;  the  diction  is  invariably  pure 
and  choice,  though  it  occasionally  sins  from  over-redundance 
of  imagery — his  desire  to  express  his  idea  perfectly  leading 
him  sometimes  to  an  exuberance  of  words ;  for  however  ab- 
sorbed he  was  in  his  subject,  Ozanam  never  forgot  that  others 


31^  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

were  listening  who  required  explanation.  His  eloquence  in 
its  most  impulsive  movements — and  it  is  full  of  impulse — is 
always  free  from  exaggeration.  He  was  preserved  from  this 
by  what,  for  want  of  a  better  word,  we  call  taste,  that  dehcate 
instinct  of  the  imagination  which  tolerates  no  excess.  French 
critics  are  fond  of  instituting  a  comparison  between  the  style 
of  Ozanam  and  his  two  celebrated  contemporaries,  Berryer 
and  Montalembert;  yet,  except  in  their  contrasts,  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  see  what  there  is  to  suggest  it.  The  philosopher  and 
historian  seldom  reaches  that  triumphant  energy  that  marks 
the  eloquence  of  the  two  political  orators.  His  power  is  of  a 
different  order  altogether;  it  is  penetrative  and  convincing 
rather  than  dazzling,  and  lingers  on  the  mind  like  the  glow  of 
sunset  long  after  the  meteoric  flash  of  the  more  brilliant  stars 
has  died  away. 


CHAPTER  XXVI. 

1853. 

And  now  we  are  on  the  threshold  of  the  closing  scene. 
We  are  approaching  that  hour  which  puts  the  seal  on  every 
life — that  hour  which,  even  on  this  side  of  the  grave,  is  like 
the  opening  of  the  Book  through  which  the  secrets  of  hearts 
are  revealed.  It  is  always  a  mournful  spectacle,  though  gene- 
rally an  instructive  and  sometimes  a  consoling  one,  to  witness 
the  last  great  crisis  of  a  human  soul,  to  watch  the  light  going 
out,  to  listen  to  the  changing  accents  of  the  well-known  voice, 
to  note,  it  may  be,  those  "  lears  of  the  brave  and  follies  of  the 
wise  "  which  come  to  mar  the  beauty  and  completeness  of  the 
final  act,  adding  poignancy  to  our  grief,  and  lingering  in  the 
memory  like  a  pain  or  a  dim,  distressing  doubt.  We  have  no 
such  experience  to  fear  from  Ozanam.  He  will  not  disap- 
point us  in  death,  who  in  life  was  faithful  to  his  noblest  self. 
Sofdy  heroic  the  life  had  been  all  through,  and  now  we  shall 
see  the  same  gentle  heroism  enduring  to  the  last. 

All  that  he  had  loved  in  life  he  loves  now  with  a  warmer 
tenderness  and  a  clearer  appreciation.  In  the  days  of  his 
boyhood  he  had  gone  through  Italy  enamored  of  lier  beauty, 
and  singing  her  praises  with  the  poetic  fervor  of  a  young 
heart.  He  is  going  through  the  sunny  land  again,  conscious 
that  the  journey  is  the  prelude  to  his  entrance  into  the  valley 
of  the  shadow  of  death,  and  yet  we  hear  him  just  as  of  old 
bursting  out  into  passionate  delight  as  the  scenes  of  familiar 
beauty  break  once  more  on  his  sight.  He  forgets  the  cruel 
throes  ot  disease,  the  exhausting  languor  that  makes  every  step 
a  pain  on  the  way  to  Nice,  and  goes  into  ecstasies  over 

3»9 


320  Life  and  Warh  oj  Frederk  Ozanam, 

*'  The  road,  of  magic  beauty,  bordered  with  olive-trees  and  orange-trees  all  in 
full  bearing,  to  say  nothing  of  the  palms  that  we  saw  at  long  distances  waving 
over  some  Roman  ruin.  Yet,  admirable  as  tins  is,  it  seems  nothing  when  you 
arrive  near  the  Antibes,  and  suddenly  behold  the  great  curtain  of  the  maritime 
Alps  unfold  itself  and  close  in  the  horizon,  mountains  whose  brow  is  crowned 
with  snow  while  their  base  is  plunged  in  a  shining  sea.  It  is  only  then  that 
the  Pyrenees  and  the  coast  of  Biscay  are  conquered  !  All  creation  is  there, 
with  the  majesty  of  the  glaciers  and  the  wealth  of  the  tropical  climes  :  oiive- 
trees  as  large  as  our  finest  oaks,  orange-trees  growing  in  forests,  oleanders 
flowering  wild  in  the  dried  beds  o^  rivers,  aloes  and  cactuses  as  in  Sicily." 

His  heart  exults  in  the  beauty  of  God's  beautiful  world,  and 
he  sees  the  hand  of  the  Creator  everywhere — in  the  grand 
waving  palms  "  that  are  worthy  to  be  borne  before  our  Saviour 
on  the  day  of  His  triumphal  entry  "  ;  in  the  glorious  hills  "  that 
are  surely  a  bit  of  the  terrestrial  Paradise  where  God  walked 
and  conversed  with  Adam."  All  the  old  memories  and  sym- 
pathies are  strong  as  ever  as  the  time  approaches  for  separa- 
tion, and  he  dwells  on  them  lovingly  and  gaily.  "  What  was 
there  to  prevent  our  fancying  ourselves  on  the  coast  of  Syria 
in  the  time  of  the  Crusades,  especially  when  the  battlements 
of  an  old  dungeon  or  some  ancient  chapel  peeped  above  the 
neighboring  hill-tops  ?  "  he  says  playfully  to  M.  Cornudet, 
and  then  goes  on  to  describe  how,  although  no  swarthy  Sara- 
cen bore  down  on  them  to  bar  the  way, 

**  Ces  dames  (t\\s  wife  and  her  mother)  declare  that,  as  we  were  ascending  the 
Esterelle,  men  armed  with  hatchets  prowled  for  a  whole  hour  about  the  car- 
riage, casting  terrible  glances  at  it.  If  this  fact  should  not  appear  to  you  suf- 
ficient to  constitute  the  robber  episode  which  ougVit  to  be  found  in  every 
journey  worth  the  name,  I  assure  you  it  is  amply  completed  by  the  multitude 
of  honest  brigands  who,  under  the  name  of  inn- keepers,  hat  in  hand,  have 
been  fleecing  and  despoiling  us  during  these  two  hundred  leagues.  In  order 
that  nothing  should  be  wanting  in  our  epopee,  we  came  by  sea  from  Genoa  to 
Leghorn,  and  that  perfidious  element  treated  us  as  so  many  heroes  :  the  winds 
were  let  loose,  the  billows  rode  over  the  deck,  and  Madame  Ozanam's  trunk 
was  so  thoroughly  soaked  that  on  alighting  at  the  hotel  she  was  compelled  to 
make  the  finest  exhibition  of  clothes  hanging  out  to  dry  that  has  ever  been 
seen  since  the  days  when  the  Princess  Nausicaa  washed  her  ]inen." 

The  monuments  of  man's  genius  claim  his  admiration  and 
interest,  as  formerly,  next  to  the  works  of  God.  Those  of 
Pisa  fascinate  him  by  their  "  young,  virginal  grace,  which  it  is 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam,  321 

impossible  to  describe.  The  cathedral,  an  edifice  of  the 
eleventh  century,  before  the  first  Crusades — that  is  to  say,  the 
creation  of  a  period  reputed  barbarous,  but  which,  after  the 
lapse  of  eight  hundred  years  of  civilization,  the  world  is  f  Tced 
to  contemplate  with  admiration,"  inspired  the  traveller  with 
one  of  those  lyrical  outbursts  that  his  intimate  correspondence 
is  full  of: 

"  When  you  enter  the  bronze  g:ates,  and,  standing  at  the  end  of  those  five 
naves  divided  by  a  forest  of  pillars,  behold  resplendent  in  the  mosaic  of  the 
vaulted  roof  the  colossal  figure  of  Christ,  seated  as  He  will  appear  on  the  last 
day,  upon  a  throne  of  glory  between  the  Blessed  Virgin  and  St.  John,  you  feel 
for  one  moment  overpowered  by  the  divine  majesty,  you  recognize  truly  the 
eternal  Son  of  the  Father,  you  rejoice  that  our  Lord  has  allowed  a  people  to 
build  Him  a  temple  that  is  almost  worthy  of  Him.  The  fear  of  God,  the  sense 
of  the  nothingness  of  man,  the  legitimate  pride  of  the  Christian,  all  these  emo- 
tions are  spontaneously  awakened,  and  you  understand  those  words  of  the 
Psalmist:  '  How  beautiful  are  thy  tabernacles,  Lord  God  of  Hosts  1 '  " 

The  unrelenting  rain  which  had  spoiled  and  checked  their 
Spanish  tour  followed  them  to  Italy,  and  Ozanam  congratu- 
lates himself  that  there  are  at  Pisa  some  places  of  resort  which 
ke  can  visit  and  enjoy  under  shelter  from  the  torrents.  "  A 
library  of  sixty  thousand  volumes  gives  me  pretty  nearly  all  I 
want  in  the  way  of  history  and  ecclesiastical  and  municipal 
antiquities,"  he  s:.ys,  and  then  relates,  with  that  generous 
pride  in  the  kindness  of  others  that  was  one  of  his  character- 
istics, how  courteous  and  obliging  everybody  is  in  tlie  said 
library;  how  the  learned  Professor  Ferrucci  has  ensconced 
him  at  a  table  in  a  comfortable  corner  free  from  draughts, 
and  how  genial  and  intelligent  are  all  the  authorities. 

"We  have,  in  fact,  a  little  Athens  here,  and  I  am  the  more  justified  in  call- 
ing it  by  this  name  in  that  there  are  a  round  hundred  of  good  Greek  students. 
But  I  must  admit  that  these  sons  of  Aristides  and  Philopoemen  are  less  assidu- 
ous at  the  schools  than  at  the  theatre,  and  have  the  name  of  not  paying  their 
debts." 

The  mention  of  schools  and  scholars  naturally  calls  up  the 
imnge  of  other  seats  of  learning  to  which  the  exile's  heart 
turns  yearningly. 


32  2  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

"Ah!  my  poor  Sorbonne  ! "  he  exclaims,  with  a  sigh,  "how  often  do  ray 
thoughts  go  back  to  the  blackened  walls,  the  bleak  courtyard,  the  studious, 
begrimed  halls  which  I  have  so  often  seen  filled  with  the  generous  youth  of 
Paris  !  Dear  friend,  next  to  the  infinite  consolations  which  a  Catholic  finds 
at  the  foot  of  the  altar,  next  to  the  joys  of  family  life,  I  know  no  greater  hap- 
piness than  that  of  addressing  young  men  who  have  heart  and  intelligence." 

He  owns,  as  if  confessing  to  a  foolish  weakness,  that  the 
memory  of  this  young,  eager,  sympathetic  crowd  is  continu- 
ally pulling  his  heart-strings  back  to  Paris ;  he  asks  for  news 
of  the  examinations,  and  "  how  the  Baccalaureats  are  getting 
on,"  with  the  tender  interest  of  a  man  recalling  the  scenes  of 
his  own  youthful  struggles  in  the  learned  Alma  Mater.  The 
very  thought  of  being  able  once  more  to  ascend  his  chair, 
and  lay  his  hand  on  the  vibrating  crowd  around  it,  stirs  him 
with  an  irrepressible  thrill  of  delight.  He  dares  not  dwell  on 
the  hope,  but  turns  aside  with  a  "  Fiat !  it  will  be  well,  how- 
ever it  ends,  for  it  will  be  as  God  wills.  Volo  quomodo  vis, 
volo  quamdiu  vis. " 

His  pleasure  in  his  friends,  in  their  sympathy,  their  joys 
and  pursuits,  is  as  keen  as  in  the  days  when  he  was  free  to 
share  them  all  actively. 

"  I  know  not  what  God  may  ordain  for  us  henceforth,"  he  says  to  his  old 
colleague  M.  Lenormant,  whose  battle  he  had  fought  so  bravely,  "  but  I  know 
that  in  choosing  our  friends  for  us  He  has  done  quite  enough  for  the  honor 
and  happiness  of  our  lives.  Whatever  bad  opinion  I  have  of  myself,  I  cannot 
believe  that  He  has  created  me  to  do  nothing,  when  He  has  made  me  ac- 
quainted, one  after  another,  with  the  grandest  Christians  of  my  time  and  the 
most  chosen  souls.  Their  ciffection,  as  you  truly  say,  supports  and  encourages 
me  ;  it  helps  me  to  bear  trials  which  are,  indeed,  tempered  to  my  weakness." 

He  is  away  over  the  Atlantic  in  spirit  with  M.  Ampere,  ex- 
cited by  the  stirring  scenes  through  which  the  erudite  traveller 
passes,  and  which  he  describes  in  his  letters  home : 

"  I  have  stood  with  you  in  the  midst  of  the  prodigious  activity  of  man,  and 
admired  the  strange  aspects  of  surrounding  nature,  the  flaming  sunsets  that 
surpass  those  of  Italy  and  Greece.  You  have  given  me  friends,  too,  in  the 
new  world  as  in  the  old  ;  through  you  I  have  penetrated  into  the  very  heart  of 
the  University  of  Cambridge  ;  you  have  introduced  me  to  men  whom  I 
scarcely  knew,  and   whom  I  now  love— Everett,  Agassiz,  and,  above  all,  tlj^ 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozatiam.  323 

poet  Longfellow.  I  owe  you  a  delightful  hour  in  his  cottage,  with  the  book 
of  his  poems  in  my  hand  ;  thanks  to  your  superior  lights,  which  have  been  «is 
precious  to  me  as  your  friendship,  I  have  been  able  to  judge  the  literature  of 
America  at  one  stroke.  I  see  it  compelled  to  link  itself  to  the  old  traditions 
of  Europe,  and  I  admit  that  the  ocean  no  longer  divides  us." 

But  the  consolation  which  Ozanam  gave  thanks  for  above 
all  others  was  the  fervent  activity  of  the  Conferences  which 
he  found  established  in  the  various  places  he  passed  through. 

"Our  little  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  has  a  great  share  in  the  pre-occu- 
pations  and  consolations  of  my  journey,"  he  says  to  M.  Cornudet,  writing 
from  Pisa.  "  1  saw  the  presidents  at  Marseilles  and  Toulouse,  where  the  re- 
spective Conferences  number  two  hundred  and  four  hundred  members.  I  saw 
also  the  president  of  Nice,  a  man  full  of  zeal,  and  as  amiable  as  he  is  pious. 
But  what  charmed  me  above  all,  what  fills  me  with  hope  for  the  future  of 
Italy,  are  the  Conferences  of  Genoa,  all  so  fervent  and  so  discreet,  amidst  the 
religious  perils  of  the  country  ;  the  president  of  these  Conferences  understands 
the  work  as  if  he  had  been  engaged  in  it  with  us  these  twenty  years,  and  he 
goes  about  propagating  it  with  indefatigable  activity  in  the  duchy  of  Genoa 
and  in  Tuscany.  .  .  .  See  the  designs  of  God  1  In  1847  I  passed  through 
Tuscany,  and  became  acquainted  with  some  zealous  and  influential  men  ;  I 
gave  them  the  rules  of  the  Society,  and  I  left  them  determined  to  do  some- 
thing. But  no  one  could  see  the  use  of  it  in  a  country  that  was  already  so 
good,  so  Christian,  and  so  rich  in  old  established  charities.  The  revolution 
came,  however,  and  ploughed  up  these  soft  soils  ;  its  ploughshare  tore  up  many 
institutions  that  only  held  on  by  dry  roots.  And  lo  !  we  now  behold  a  new 
proselytism  multiplying  our  Conferences :  the  ecclesiastical  authorities  lend  it 
their  countenance,  religious  orders  commend  it,  fervent  laymen  become  en- 
rolled in  it.  The  Conferences  are  flourishing  at  Leghorn  and  at  Pisa  ;  they 
are  beginning  to  prosper  at  Florence  and  Pontadera  ;  they  are  being  establish- 
ed at  Prato,  about  to  be  so  at  Volterra  and  Porto  Ferrajo  ;  here  then  we 
shall  have  seven  families  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  in  this  fair  Tuscan  land, 
where  Catholicism  was  languishing,  stifled,  as  it  were,  under  the  golden 
chains  of  Josephism.  But  the  most  important  thing  of  all,  and  that  which 
touches  me  most,  is  that  the  primitive  spirit  of  our  Society  has  communicated 
itself  so  wonderfully  to  our  new  brethren.  I  have  met  with  all  the  simplicity 
and  cordiality  of  our  early  beginnings  amongst  them.  Don't  picture  to  your- 
self solemn,  cold  meetings  of  old  parishioners  in  black  silk  skull-caps.  Not 
that  the  old  are  excluded  ;  but  I  see  with  pleasure  a  great  effluence  of  young 
men,  students,  merchants'  clerks,  sons  of  noble  families,  university  professors, 
and  the  draper  round  the  comer,  all  elbowing  each  other,  and  all  led  by  first- 
rate  presidents.  I  cannot  tell  you  how  attached  they  all  are  to  the  centre  of 
the  Society,  nor  what  an  amount  of  consideration  they  hav$  shown  to  tbt 
vice-president  of  the  Conseil-G(n(ral.^'' 


324  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

The  Conference  of  Florence  was  a  subject  of  special  joy 
and  edification  to  Ozanam. 

"  In  this  capital  of  Josephism,"  he  says,  "a  learned  canon,*  whose  mother 
is  lady  of  honor  to  the  Grand  Duchess,  devotes  all  his  zeal  to  the  propagation 
of  our  confraternity.  I  had  the  consolation  of  assisting  at  one  of  their  meet- 
ings, as  I  did  at  those  of  our  confreres  of  London  and  Burgos.  Tears  of  joy 
start  to  my  eyes  when  at  these  great  distances  I  meet  our  little  family,  always 
little  by  the  obscurity  of  its  works,  but  great  through  the  blessing  of  God  upon 
it.  The  tongues  are  different,  but  it  is  always  the  same  friendly  clasp  of  the 
hand,  the  same  brotherly  cordiality,  and  we  can  recognize  each  other  by  the 
same  sign  as  the  early  Christians  :  *  See  how  they  love  one  another  !'  " 

He  is  delighted  with  the  great  concourse  of  people  in  the 
churches  and  at  the  Divine  offices,  even  on  week-days,  at  Pisa, 
where,  "  so  different  from  our  France,  one  sees  not  only  des 
gens  comme  il  faui.  but  workmen,  peasants,  coachmen,  and 
market-women  in  such  numbers  that  one  has  to  elbow  one's 
way  through  them  to  get  to  a  seat  on  one  of  the  benches  that 
replace  our  prie-dieu."  But  this  consoling  manifestation  of 
faith  dof^s  not  blind  him  to  other  facts.  He  sees  Protestantism 
making  tremendous  efforts  in  Italy,  "  and  meeting  with  the 
sympathies  that  it  already  excited  in  the  sixteenth  century. 
There  is  a  great  liberty  for  publishing  and  selling,"  he  adds ; 
''  I  have  seen  translations  of  the  very  worst  French  books 
figuring  on  the  stalls  of  the  little  book-pedlars  at  Florence. 
The  clergy  are  frightened,  and  fright  does  good,  inasmuch  as 
it  wakes  them  up.  The  Church  sees  that  she  is  on  the  eve 
of  recommencing  a  life  of  struggle,  and  the  near  approach  of 
the  combat  renders  possible  now  works  that  six  years  ago 
would  have  been  considered  inopportune." 

Genoa  offers  the  same  varied  character  to  his  observation. 

"  In  this  most  democratic  of  cities  I  found  pretty  much  the  same  physiognomy 
as  in  Paris  at  the  end  of  1848.  The  book-shops  and  stalls  expose  for  sale  the 
most  audacious  pamphlets ;  Protestantism,  Fourierism,  and  every  description 
df  socialism  placard  their  special  propaganda.  .  .  .  On  the  other  hand,  there 
is  a  great  awakening  of  CathoHcism  in  this  country,  which  has  been  so  long 

•Guido  Palagi,  a  canon  of  the  cathedral  who  died  in  September,  1871.  He  was  followed  to 
the  grave  by  the  entire  population  of  Florence,  whom  he  had  edified  by  his  heroiq  virtues  dur. 
ing  a  long  life. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  325 

asleep,  a  serious  effort  to  resist  the  propaganda  of  the  enemy  ;  there  are  five 
Conferences  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  counting  those  of  the  suburbs  ;  and  at  the 
head  of  them  are  men  of  talent  and  activity.  Here  at  Pisa  the  Revolution 
seems  to  have  passed  over  the  heads  of  the  people,  and  to  have  acted  only  on 
the  upper  classes.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  faith  amongst  the  people,  at  least 
if  one  may  judge  from  the  churches  overflowing  with  men  even  on  the  week- 
days. In  the  middle  classes,  and  amongst  the  students,  Voltairianism  is  rife, 
but  the  case  is  different  amongst  men  of  letters  and  savants ;  many  of  these 
are  still  Italians  of  the  last  century,  minding  only  their  own  business,  abusing 
the  priests  every  now  and  then,  but  performing  their  duties  as  Christians. 
Others  are  converts,  men  of  noble  minds,  open  to  all  that  is  generous  in  the 
new  ideas,  but  reduced  to  silence  by  Austrian  bayonets." 

An  incident  occurred  in  connection  with  the  foundation  of 
the  Conferences  in  Tuscany  which  Ozanam,  with  characteristic 
modesty,  refrains  from  mentioning  even  in  his  intimate  letters 
home.  It  was  true  that  when  he  arrived  at  Pisa  he  found  the 
Society  was  known  there,  and  already  counted  many  admi- 
rers, who  were  eager  to  propagate  it ;  but  their  efforts  had 
been  crushed  in  the  bud  by  the  Grand-Ducal  Government,  in 
whose  eyes  the  whole  thing  bore  a  dangerous  and  suspicious 
character.  The  struggle  to  overcome  tliis  opposition  was  all 
but  given  up  when  Ozanam  arrived  at  Pisa,  and  he  at  once 
took  zealous  steps  towards  reviving  the  movement.  His 
name  carried  weight  with  it;  for  he  was  well  known,  even 
celebrated,  in  the  country  on  account  of  his  work  on  Dante, 
which  had  been  enthusiastically  applauded,  and  translated 
several  times  into  Italian.  The  Dowager  Grand-Duchess 
heard  of  his  arrival,  and  coming  one  day  to  Pisa,  sent  word 
to  him  to  wait  upon  her  the  same  evening.  He  was  extreme- 
ly ill  just  then,  and  it  required  an  heroic  effort  to  rise  from  his 
sick-bed,  and  betake  himself  in  full  dress  to  a  royal  audience; 
but  no  personal  sacrifice  could  deter  Ozanam  when  there  was 
a  chance  of  furthering  the  cause  of  charity.  He  got  up,  and 
was  at  the  palace  at  the  appointed  hour.  The  Grand- Duchess 
was  a  large-hearted  woman,  possessing  a  cultivated  mind  and 
a  genuine  zeal  for  good  works.  She  received  the  pale,  dark- 
eyed  Frenchman  with  kindness  and  sympathy;  but  she  was 
strongly  prejudiced  against  his  work,  and  bluntly  tolc^  him  so; 


326  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

adding  that  the  Grand- Duke  believed  the  Society  of  St.  Vin- 
cent de  Paul  to  be  a  hotbed  of  socialism  and  political  intrigue, 
and  that  he  never  could  be  induced  to  sanction  its  presence 
in  his  States  unless  certain  men,  whom  she  mentioned,  were 
dismissed  from  amongst  the  members.  Ozanam  answered 
these  accusations  with  respectful  boldness  ;  he  told  the  story 
of  the  origin  of  the  Httle  confraternity,  and  how  from  the  very 
starting  its  founders  had  directed  that  it  should  be  a  work,  of 
charity,  from  which  the  political  element  should  be  rigorously 
excluded ;  this  primary  condition  of  the  Society  made  it  in- 
cumbent on  them  to  receive  indiscriminately  any  person  who 
presented  himself,  provided  he  was  an  honorable  man  and  a 
Christian.  He  spoke  with  great  warmth  and  all  the  glow  of 
an  enthusiasm  purified,  but  not  abated,  by  suffering  and  the 
approach  of  death.  The  Grand-Duchess  listened  with  pro- 
found attention,  and  a  few  days  later  the  Conference  at  Flo- 
rence received  formal  notice  of  the  sanction  of  the  Govern- 
ment. 

Ozanam  was  induced  to  speak  at  the  opening  siance^  and 
his  speech,  delivered  of  course  in  Italian,  was  considered  so 
fine  that  it  was  printed  in  all  the  newspapers  next  day.  He 
was  annoyed  beyond  measure,  and  declared  he  never  would 
have  spoken  had  he  foreseen  such  a  result.  *'  It  is  entirely 
contrary  to  the  spirit  of  the  Society,  which  is  to  work  in 
obscurity  and  make  no  noise,"  he  said.  Soon  after,  they  again 
begged  him  to  address  the  Conference ;  he  only  consented  on 
the  express  condition  that  the  offence  was  not  repeated.  The 
next  day,  however,  several  important  members  came  to  en- 
treat him  to  release  them  from  the  promise ;  he  resisted  their 
persuasions  for  three  days,  but  at  last  yielded  to  the  prayer  of 
his  confessor,  who  assured  him  the  speech,  if  circulated,  would 
probably  lead  to  the  formation  of  a  Conference  at  Loreto. 
He  gave  permission  for  one  hundred  copies  to  be  struck  off; 
but  this  was  extended  to  twelve  hundred,  a  piece  of  treachery 
which  the  orator  did  not  quite  forgive,  until  he  found  that  it 
had  led  to  the  forming  of  Conferences  at  Macerata,  Porto  Fer^ 


Lif^  a;:d  J '.  \,r',s  cf  F, cdc i :c  Czanam.  327 

raj.),  and  in   Sardinia,  where  the  speech  of  the  **  celebrated 
French  Professor  "  produced  a  great  effect. 

The  success  of  this  effort  seemed  to  give  new  life  to  Ozanam, 
and,  in  spite  of  the  dreary,  disappointing  winter,  with  its  eter- 
nal rain,  he  gradually  gained  strength  towards  the  spring,  and 
with  it  his  hopes  of  a  possible  recovery  revived. 

"They  don't  disguise  from  me  the  fact  that  my  illness  is  slow  and  difficult 
to  cure,"  he  says  to  M.  Ampere,  in  the  first  days  of  April ;  "but  as  there  is 
now  no  fever,  and  as  I  still  keep  by  me  two  excellent  doctors — sleep  and  appe- 
tite— they  give  me  good  hopes,  and  allow  me  to  think  of  returning  home  by 
the  end  of  April,  and  even  to  talk  of  resuming  my  cours  on  the  15th  of  May  ! 
Meantime  we  have  had  some  painful  hours  and  great  anxiety.  All  agreed  that 
a  warm  and  dry  climate  was  absolutely  essential  for  me,  and  we  have  been 
hving  for  over  sixty  days  in  a  continued  down-pour  of  rain,  which  is  constantly 
calling  up  these  lines  of  Dante  : 

'  lo  sono  al  tcrzo  cerchio  della  piova 
Etema,  maledetta,  fredda  e  grave  ; 
Regola  e  qualiti  mai  non  1'^  nuova/ 

"  It  is  possible  to  read  the  In/crno  in  spite  of  the  rain,  but  one  cannot  carry 
one's  dreams  to  the  Carapo  Santo,  where  the  torrents  are  enough  to  wash  out 
all  that  remains  to  one  of  the  history  of  Job.  .  .  .  We  stay  at  home  by  the 
chimney-comer ;  but  consolations  are  not  wanting  in  this  home  which  trial  has 
visited.  You  know  what  an  angel  of  goodness  dwells  therein,  and  what  a 
merry  imp  enlivens  it.  .  .  .  Moreover,  God,  who  is  the  best  of  friends,  never 
abandons  those  whom  he  tries.  At  this  moment  He  has  granted  me  a  mental 
serenity  which  is  not  usual  to  me.  In  this  peaceful  city,  in  the  midst  of  this 
life  of  rest,  I  seem  to  taste  the  sweets  of  family  affection  more  deeply,  to  caress 
the  memories  of  friendship  more  at  my  ease ;  I  have  leisure  to  look  into  my 
own  heart,  and  I  find  much  to  correct  there ;  but  I  think  I  find  peace  and  faith 
there,  and  this  suffices  for  many  moments  of  pure  happiness." 

We  repeat  it :  few  men,  out  of  the  ranks  of  the  saints,  were 
more  diligent  in  giving  thanks  than  Ozanam.  It  was  a 
favorite  exercise  of  his  to  recall,  in  meditation,  all  the  graces 
and  mercies  he  had  received  from  his  childhood  upwards,  and 
to  return  thanks  for  tliem  one  by  one.  On  the  day  of  his 
marriage,  when  he  took  his  young  wife  home,  he  told  her  how 
he  had  suffered  from  doubts  when  a  boy,  and  how  he  had 
been  delivered  from  them,  and  sworn  to  devote  himself  ever 
after  to  the  defence  and  service  of  God's  truth  ;  he  then  asked 
if  she  would  join  him  daily  in  giving  thanks  for  this  particular 


^2^  Life  and  Works  oj Frederic  Ozanam, 

mercy;  and  every  night  from  that  day  forth,  until  the  last 
that  he  spent  on  earth,  they  sent  up  their  act  of  thanksgiving 
together. 

In  the  midst  of  his  keenest  sufferings,  gratitude,  the  sense 
of  the  alleviations  and  blessings  granted  him,  rose  above  every 
other  feeling.  His  letters  all  through  this  painful  winter  are 
like  canticles  of  thanksgiving : 

"You  know  her  whom  God  has  given  me  for  my  visible  g^uardian  ang-el ; 
you  have  seen  her  at  work,"  he  writes  to  an  old  friend  from  rainy  Pisa ;  "but 
since  my  illness  has  become  serious,  you  can  have  no  conception  of  the  resources 
she  has  discovered  in  her  heart,  not  only  to  relieve  but  to  cheer  me ;  with  what 
ingenious,  patient,  indefatigable  tenderness  she  surrounds  my  life,  guessing, 
cinticipating  every  wish.  Happily  God  gives  her  strength  for  it ;  she  and  my 
little  Marie  are  in  perfect  health  just  now.  My  mother-in-law  has  also  made  her 
pilgrimage  to  Rome  without  any  mishap.  We  hear  from  her  often,  and  also 
from  my  brothers  and  many  friends.  We  have  some  kind  and  agreeable 
visitors  who  bring  a  little  new  life  into  our  solitude,  and  we  have  good  and 
beautiful  books  in  abundance.  So  you  see  that  Divine  Providence,  while  try- 
ing us,  does  not  forsake  us.  God  treats  us  mercifully  ;  and  if  there  are  days 
of  despondency,  there  are  moments  too  of  exquisite  enjoyment  between  my 
wife  and  my  child.  I  know  that  my  malady  is  serious,  but  not  utterly  hope- 
less ;  that  I  shall  take  a  long  time  to  recover,  and  that  I  may  never  recover ; 
but  I  try  to  abandon  myself  lovingly  to  the  will  of  God,  and  I  repeat — more 
with  the  lips  than  with  the  heart,  I  fear  ! —  Volo  quod  vis^  volo  quamdiu  vt's, 
volo  quia  vz's." 

One  day,  at  San  Jacopo,*  he  took  a  piece  of  paper  and 
wrote  down,  in  the  form  of  a  prayer,  an  enumeration  of  the 
many  "  little  kindnesses  "  he  had  received  from  God. 

"  We  are  not  sufficiently  grateful  for  God's  little  benefits.  We  thank  Him 
for  having  created  and  redeemed  us,  and  given  us  good  parents,  and  a  wife, 
and  beloved  children,  and  for  so  often  giving  us  Himself  in  the  Sacrament  of 
the  Altar.  But  besides  these  powerful  graces,  which  support,  so  to  speak,  the 
woof  of  our  life,  how  many  delicate  graces  are  wrought  into  the  tissue  1  There 
was  the  steady  comrade  I  met  during  my  first  year  at  college,  and  who  edified 
instead  of  corrupting  me  ;  there  was  M.  Ampere's  paternal  welcome,  and  M. 
de  Chateaubriand's  advice  to  me  not  to  go  to  the  theatre.  And  then,  smaller 
things  than  these,  an  inspiration  that  prompted  me  to  go  and  see  my  poor  on  a 
day  when  I  was  in  a  bad  humor,  and  sent  me  home  ashamed  of  my  imaginary 
woes  by  the  side  of  the  appalling  reality  of  theirs.  How  often  has  some  insig- 
nificant circumstance,  an  importunity,  a  visitor  that  bored  me,  and  whom  I 

•  It  was  to  this  village  on  the  sea,  near  Leghorn,  that  that  grand  soul,  Mrs.  Scton,  cam« 
wiA  Inr  iyiag  bwAM4.    They  reoouncd  theri  a  month ;  she  left  it  a  widow. 


Life  and  Works  of  Fraicric  Cziinam.  329 

wished  at  Hongf-kong,  been  the  occasion  later  of  enabling  me  to  do  good  to 
someone." 

He  forced  himself  to  write  in  a  comparatively  hopeful 
tone,  but  he  had  in  reality  little  or  no  hope  of  ultimate  re- 
covery. 

"  During  the  last  three  weeks  of  Lent,"  he  says  to  M.  Ampere,  '*  I  was  pre- 
paring myself  seriously  for  the  final  sacrifice.  It  cost  nature  something,  yet 
through  God's  help  it  seemed  to  me  that  I  was  beginning  to  detach  myself 
from  everything  except  from  those  who  love  me,  and  whom  I  can  love  else- 
where than  here  below.  But  my  poor  wife  prayed  so  hard,  and  got  so  many 
prayers  said,  that  I  begin  to  revive,  and  without  being  cured  I  may  venture  to 
hope  for  a  cure.  The  worst  of  it  is,  that  I  attach  myself  again  at  once  to  life, 
and  all  the  vanities  of  Ufe.  According  as  I  begin  to  think  seriously  of  seeing 
Paris  again,  I  think  of  my  work,  of  my  schemes,  and — must  I  own  it  ?— of  the 
opinion  of  the  learned  and  the  public  1  This  draws  me  off  to  the  circulating 
library — another  piece  of  vanity  ;  I  read  the  Rei'ue  des  Deux  Mondes^  ,  .  . 
and  I  ask  myself  if  you  could  not  find  a  page  there  to  devote  to  my  Poites 
Pranciscains.  But  would  it  be  possible  for  you  to  find  time  to  occupy  your- 
self with  these  beggars  ?  And  yet  they  deserve  something  at  your  hands,  for 
you  know  what  your  friends  Dante  and  Giotto  owe  to  St.  Francis.  .  .  .  My 
poor /'<??/^jr*  have  found  a  cordial  welcome  here.  Cardinal  Mai  was  greatly 
taken  with  the  life  of  Jacopone,  and  sent  me  many  kind  complimentar>'  mes- 
sages. .  .  .  See  what  comes  of  a  half-and-half  convalescence  1  Perhaps  to- 
morrow a  relapse  will  come  and  make  short  work  of  my  literary  projects,  but 
to-day  the  stray  sunbeam  that  is  awakening  the  flowers  wakes  up  my  hopes 
and  ambitions  too." 

He  said  truly  it  was  but  a  stray  beam,  a  passing  respite  in 
the  struggle.  The  malady  was  working  its  way  slowly  but 
inexorably  ;  the  improvement  that  sliowed  itself  from  time  to 
time  was  only  a  delusive  one,  a  transient  alleviation  caused 
by  some  new  remedy,  or  a  change  of  climate,  or  sometimes 
by  an  effort  of  the  vigorous  will  asserting  its  supremacy  over 
the  exhausted  body.  Ozanam  underwent  every  remedy  that 
was  proposed,  often  even  when  he  had  no  belief  in  their  effi- 
cacy ;  his  cheerfulness,  his  unselfish  thought  for  those  around 
him,  enabled  him  to  disguise  his  own  hopelessness,  in  order 
not  to  destroy  the  faint  hopes  of  others.  Prayer  and  medita- 
tion on  Divine  things  were  the  fountains  from  which  he  drew 

•  The  Poites  Franciicains  had  come  out  in  detached  articles  in  the  Correspoitdant,  and  were 
alreaidy  widely  knuwn,  but  they  were  publibhcd  in  a  collective  fonn  only  about  this  time. 


330  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanant, 

his  serenity  and  courage.  He  had  loved  the  Scriptures 
above  every  other  book  all  his  life ;  it  had  been  his  practice 
from  boyhood  to  read  a  portion  of  the  Gospels  every  day ;  he 
called  this  his  "  daily  bread  "  ;  he  generally  read  the  Bible  in 
Greek  from  an  old  edidon  that  he  was  fond  of.  Now  that 
evil  days  were  come,  and  that  he  was  called  upon  to  prove 
himself,  he  remained  faithful  to  this  habit  of  his  life.  Every 
morning,  the  first  thing  on  awaking,  he  gave  half  an  hour  to 
reading  the  Bible,  and  at  the  end  of  his  meditation  he  would 
note  down  the  texts  which  had  penetrated  him  most  during 
the  course  of  it,  in  order  that  he  might  refer  to  them,  and  rest 
his  mind  on  them  throughout  the  day.  He  derived  such  ex- 
traordinary comfort  and  sustenance  from  this  practice,  that  it 
occurred  to  him  he  might  in  his  helplessness  still  render  a  last 
service  to  other  invalids  by  pointing  out  to  them  the  pas- 
sages  that  had  soothed  and  nourished  his  own  soul  in  the 
course  of  his  illness.  His  wife  gladly  acquiesced  in  the  sug- 
gestion, and  every  morning  wrote  down  some  pages  from  his 
dictation.  These  have  since  been  put  together  and  publish- 
ed under  the  title  of  Le  Livre  des  Malades,  On  the  23d  of 
April,  his  birthday,  and  the  anniversary  of  his  marriage,  he 
wrote  in  his  own  hand  the  following  lines : 

*'I  said  :  In  the  midst  of  my  days  I  shall  go  to  the  gates  of  hell ;  I  sought 
for  the  residue  of  my  years. 

*'  I  said  :  I  shall  not  see  the  Lord  God  in  the  land  of  the  living.  I  shall  be- 
hold man  no  more,  nor  the  inhabitant  of  rest. 

"  My  generation  is  at  an  end  ;  and  it  is  rolled  away  from  me  as  a  shepherd's 
tent.  My  life  is  cut  off  as  by  a  weaver  ;  whilst  I  was  yet  but  beginning  he  cut 
me  off ;  from  morning  even  to  night  Thou  wilt  make  an  end  of  me. 

"I  hoped  till  morning;  as  a  lion  so  hath  he  broken  all  my  bones;  from 
morning  even  to  night  Thou  wilt  make  an  end  of  me. 

"I  will  cry  like  a  young  swallow  ;  I  will  meditate  like  a  dove  ;  my  eyes  are 
weakened  looking  upward.     Lord,  I  suffer  violence  ;  answer  Thou  for  me. 

"  What  shall  I  say,  or  what  shall  he  answer  for  me,  whereas  he  himself 
hath  done  it  ?  I  will  recount  to  thee  all  my  years  in  the  bitterness  of  my 
soul. 

•' This  is  the  beginning  of  the  canticle  of  Ezechias.  I  know  not  whether 
God  will  permit  me  to  apply  to  myself  the  end  of  it.  I  know  that  I  complete 
to-day  my  fortieth  year,  more  than  half  the  ordinary  term  of  man's  life.     I 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  331 

know  that  I  have  a  young  and  beloved  wife,  a  charming  child,  excellent 
brothers,  a  second  mother,  many  friends,  an  honorable  career,  studies  brought 
precisely  to  the  point  when  they  might  serve  as  the  foundations  of  a  work  long 
dreamed  of.  And  yet  I  am  a  prey  to  a  long  and  grievous  malady,  which  is 
the  more  dangerous  that  it  hides  perhaps  a  complete  exhaustion.  Must  I  then 
leave  all  these  things  that  Thou  Thyself  hast  given  me,  Lord  ?  Wilt  Thou 
not  be  satisfied  with  a  portion  of  the  sacrifice  ?  Which  of  my  irregular  affec- 
tions must  I  immolate  to  Thee  ?  Wilt  Thou  not  accept  the  holocaust  of  my 
literary  self-love,  of  my  academical  ambitions,  of  even  my  projects  of  work, 
wherein  mayhap  there  mingled  mor«:  of  pride  than  of  pure  zeal  for  truth  ?  If 
I  sold  half  my  books  and  gave  the  price  to  the  poor,  and,  confining  myself  to 
the  bare  duties  of  my  position,  were  to  consecrate  the  rest  of  my  life  to  visit- 
ing the  indigent,  teaching  apprentices  and  soldiers,  wouldst  Thou  be  satisfied. 
Lord,  and  wouldst  Thou  leave  me  the  happiness  of  growing  old  beside  my 
wife,  and  of  finishing  the  education  of  my  child  ? 

*'  Perhaps,  Lord,  Thou  dost  not  so  will  it.  Thou  dost  not  accept  these  in- 
terested offers ;  Thou  dost  reject  ray  holocausts  and  my  sacrifices.  It  is  myself 
Thou  dost  ask.  '  It  is  written  in  the  beginning  of  the  book  that  I  must  do 
Thy  will,*  and  I  said,  '  Lord,  I  come  ! ' 

"  I  come,  if  Thou  callest  me,  and  I  have  no  right  to  complain.  Thou  hast 
given  forty  years  of  live  to  a  creature  who  entered  this  world  sickly,  fragile, 
destined  to  die  ten  times,  if  ten  times  he  had  not  been  rescued  by  the  tender- 
ness and  intelligence  of  a  father  and  mother.  Let  not  my  people  be  scandal- 
ized if  Thou  dost  not  see  good  now  to  work  a  miracle  in  order  to  save 
me  !  .  .  .  Five  years  ago  Thou  didst  bring  me  back  almost  from  death,  and 
was  not  this  delay  granted  me  to  do  penance  and  become  better  ?  Ah  !  the 
prayers  that  were  sent  up  to  Thee  then  were  heard.  Wliy  should  those  that 
are  being  offered  now,  and  in  so  far  greater  number,  on  my  behalf,  be  lost  ? 
Perhaps  Thou  wilt  answer  them,  Lord,  in  another  way.  Thou  wilt  give  me 
courage,  resignation,  peace  of  soul,  and  those  ineffable  consolations  that 
accompany  Thy  real  presence.  Thou  wilt  enable  me  to  find  in  illness  a  source 
of  merit  and  of  blessings,  and  these  blessings  Thou  wilt  cause  to  fall  on  my 
wife  and  my  child — on  all  those  to  whom  my  labors  perchance  would  have 
been  less  useful  than  my  sufferings.  If  I  express  the  years  of  my  life  with 
bitterness  before  Thee,  it  is  because  of  the  sins  that  have  sullied  them  ;  but 
when  I  consider  the  graces  that  have  enriched  them,  I  look  back  upon  them, 
Lord,  with  gratitude  to  Thee. 

"  If  Thou  shouldst  chain  me  to  this  sick-bed  for  the  days  that  I  have  yet  to 
live,  they  would  be  too  short  to  thank  Thee  for  the  days  that  I  have  lived. 
Ah  !  if  these  pages  be  the  last  I  ever  write,  may  they  be  a  hymn  to  Thy  good- 
ness ! " 

Such  were  the  outpourings  in  which  Ozanam's  soul  sought 
comfort  amidst  the  cruel  distress  of  bodily  sufferings.  But  he 
did  not  force  himself  to  dwell  exclusively  in  sublime  and 
solemn   thoughts.      When   a  respite  from   pain  restored   his 


332  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

strength  a  little  he  seized  the  opportunity  to  send  letters  to 
absent  friends,  full  of  the  old  brightness. 


"  I  am  deeply  touched  by  your  kind  reproaches,"  he  says  to  the  Marquis  de 
Salvo,  in  one  of  these  breathing-spaces,  "  but  assuredly  I  should  not  have  de- 
served them  if  my  pen  were  as  ready  as  my  heart ;  if  my  thoughts,  which  are 
so  often  at  the  Rue  d'Angouleme,  could  transform  themselves  into  a  letter  and 
fly  to  you  on  white  wings.  But,  alas !  those  poor  thoughts  have  lost  their 
wings,  if  ever  they  had  any,  and  this  forced  inaction  weighs  heavily  on  my  spirit. 
What  little  verve  was  left  me  I  have  spent  on  Ampere,  whom  it  is  my  interest 
to  conciliate  in  his  quahty  of  Academician,  and  to  persuade  that  I  have  not 
sunk  quite  to  the  level  of  the  beast  1  I  have  exhausted  all  my  topics  with  him 
too.  .  .  .  My  wife  adores  this  country,  but  she  is,  above  all,  in  love  with  the 
fishermen  and  their  pretty  barks  with  lateen  sails  :  she  has  made  a  vow  that 
if  I  recover,  we  should  sell  our  books  and  buy  a  boat,  and  go  off  singing  with 
the  Italian  coral-fishers  along  the  coasts  of  Sicily  and  Sardinia.  Luckily  I  did 
not  go  partners  in  the  vow  ;  I  hold  to  fatherland,  and  I  suspect  that  the  first 
sail  that  bears  me  away  will  be  set  towards  France." 


M.  de  Salvo  was  a  Sicilian  gentleman  long  resident  in 
Paris.  He  had  made  Ozanam's  acquaintance  when  the  latter 
was  known  to  i^^N  of  the  great  world,  and,  with  that  instinct 
which  enables  cultivated  minds  to  recognize  genius  before 
fame  has  made  it  patent,  he  held  out  his  hand  to  the  young 
Professor,  prophesying  that  he  would  one  day  be  a  great  man. 
Ozanam  was  for  years  a  constant  and  honored  guest  in  the 
salofi  of  the  Marquise  de  Salvo,  and  also  in  those  of  Madame 
Swetchine  and  Madame  R6camier,  where  he  met  the  ^lite  of 
social  as  well  as  intellectual  celebrities.  M.  Ampere  the 
father  had  presented  him  to  Madame  Recamier  when  he  was 
a  student  in  Paris,  but  Ozanam  seldom  went  to  her  house ; 
and  when  she  playfully  reproached  him  with  this,  he  said,  "  I 
am  too  young  yet  for  such  learned  and  wise  company,  ma- 
dame;  when  I  am  a  man,  in  seven  years  hence,  I  will  return 
and  pay  iny  respects  to  you  very  often,  if  you  permit  me." 
When  he  did  return  to  Paris  as  a  married  man,  one  of  his 
earliest  visits  was  to  the  charming  recluse  of  the  Abbaye-aux 
Bois.  *' Ah,  so  you  have  kept  your  promise!  "  she  exclaimed 
laughingly  when  he  appeared ;  "  it  is  just  seven  years  since 


Life  and  Wofks  of  Frederic  OzanatH.  3^3 

your  last  visit  to  me !  "     And  so  it  was  ;  Ozanam  had  forgot- 
ten the  promise,  but  he  had  kept  it. 

He  had  become  acquainted  at  Pisa  with  a  Jew  who  had  re- 
cently embraced  Christianity  at  the  cost  of  many  sacrifices, 
and  had  still  much  to  contend  with.  Ozanam  was  deeply  in- 
terested in  him,  and  when  the  convert  left  Italy  he  gave  him 
some  valuable  introductions  to  friends  in  Paris,  and  corre- 
sponded with  him,  making  it  a  duty  to  sustain  and  cheer  him 
by  letters  suffused  with  his  own  vigorous  and  joyous  faith. 

' '  It  would  have  been  a  delight  to  me  to  write  to  you  much  sooner,  had  I  not 
been  too  weak  to  accomplish  it,"  he  says.  "  But  the  hand  of  God  has  touched 
me,  I  believe,  as  it  touched  Job,  Ezechias,  and  Tobias,  not  unto  death,  but 
unto  a  prolonged  trial.  I  have  not,  unfortunately,  the  patience  of  those  just 
men  ;  I  am  easily  cast  down  by  suffering,  and  I  should  be  inconsolable  for  my 
weakness  if  I  did  not  find  in  the  Psalms  those  cries  of  sorrow  which  David 
sends  forth  to  God,  and  which  God  at  last  answers  by  granting  him  pardon 
and  peace.  Oh  !  my  friend,  when  one  has  the  happiness  to  have  become  a 
Christian,  it  is  a  great  honor  to  be  born  an  Israelite,  to  feel  one's  self  the  son 
of  those  patriarchs  and  prophets  whose  utterances  are  so  beautiful  that  the 
Church  has  found  nothing  finer  to  place  on  the  lips  of  her  children.  During 
many  weeks  of  extreme  languor  the  Psalms  have  never  been  out  of  my  hands. 
I  was  never  wearied  of  reading  over  and  over  those  sublime  lamentations,  those 
flights  of  hope,  those  supplications  full  of  love  which  answer  to  all  the  wants 
and  all  the  miseries  of  human  nature.  It  is  nearly  three  thousand  years  since 
a  king  composed  those  songs  in  his  days  of  rej>entance  and  desolation,  and  we 
still  find  in  them  the  expression  of  our  deepest  anguish  and  the  consolation  of 
our  sorrows.  The  priest  recites  them  daily ;  thousands  of  monasteries  have 
been  founded  in  order  that  these  psalms  might  be  chanted  at  ever>'  hour,  and 
that  this  voice  of  supplication  might  never  be  silent.  The  Gospel  alone  is  suf)e- 
rior  to  the  hymns  of  David,  and  this  only  because  it  is  their  fulfilment,  because 
all  the  yearnings,  all  the  ardors,  all  the  holy  impatience  of  the  prophet  find 
their  accomplishment  in  the  Redeemer  issued  of  his  race.  So  great  is  the 
bond  between  the  two  Testaments  that  the  Redeemer  Himself  had  no  name 
dearer  to  Him  than  that  of  Son  0/  David.  The  two  blind  men  of  Jericho 
called  Him  by  it,  and  I  often  cry  out  to  him  with  them,  •  Son  of  David,  have 
mercy  on  us  ! '" 

The  warmth  of  the  soft  Italian  summer  by  the  seaside 
brought  a  perceptible  improvement  to  Ozanam's  health  he 
was  once  more  induced  to  believe  himself  really  better. 

"  I  take  long  walks,"  he  tells  M.  Ampdre,  at  the  end  of  June.     "  I  pass  my 


334  ^i/^  ^^'^^  tVorh  of  Frederic  QzandM. 

morning  on  the  rocks,  watching  the  sea,  until  I  have  learned  the  play  of  its 
waves  by  heart.  I  am  gaining  strength  but  slowly,  which  was  to  be  expected 
after  so  severe  a  crisis ;  but  if  July  and  August,  who  pass  for  being  great  phy- 
sicians, treat  me  well,  I  shall  be  cured  this  autumn," 

The  old  passion  for  work  came  back,  strong  as  ever,  with 
the  slight  return  of  strength. 

"  Since  I  find  myself  equal  to  thinking  and  writing,  I  am  writing  my  Odys- 
sey, my  journey  to  Burgos,  in  spite  of  Madame  Ozanam's  protestations,"  he 
says,  with  that  touching  waywardness  of  invalids,  who  rebel  against  an  autho- 
rity rendered  powerless  by  love.  "  Don't  scold  ;  I  had  a  whole  portfolio  full 
of  notes  nearly  all  ready,  and  then  legends,  songs  bought  in  the  streets,  and 
finally  the  poem  of  the  Cid.  ...  I  have  even  made  my  peace  with  my  impla- 
cable guardian  by  reading  to  her  a  certain  page  of  my  work  where  she  recog- 
nized the  merry  row  of  the  Spanish  kitchens." 

In  the  midst  of  his  many  consolations,  there  was  one  dis- 
appointment which  Ozanam  felt  keenly :  he  had  failed  to  es- 
tabhsh  a  Conference  at  Siena.  It  was  all  the  more  to  be 
regretted  because  the  Grand  Duke  had  recently  divided  the 
University  of  Pisa,  and  placed  half  of  it  at  Siena,  which  thus 
became  the  centre  of  a  young  population  grievously  in  want 
of  some  moral  resource  in  the  shape  of  healthy  and  interesting 
occupation.  The  effeminate  character  of  the  young  Tuscans 
themselves,  added  to  local  prejudices  against  the  Society,  had, 
however,  frustrated  every  attempt  to  import  it  there  up  to  the 
present.  Ozanam  could  not  be  persuaded  but  that  a  vigorous 
personal  effort  might  overcome  these  obstacles,  so  he  deter- 
mined to  go  to  Siena  himself.  His  wife  and  medical  advisers 
entreated  him  not  to  compromise  the  improvement  in  his 
health  by  the  fatigue  and  excitement  of  the  step,  but  he 
silenced  this  argument  by  asking,  "  What  better  use  can  we 
make  of  the  health  God  gives  us  than  by  exercising  it  in  His 
service  ? "  He  certainly  did  not  spare  it  on  this  occasion. 
During  the  four  days  that  he  remained  at  Siena  he  worked 
indefatigably  at  the  business  of  his  mission ;  but  it  was  all  to 
no  purpose.  Padre  Pendola,  who  was  his  friend,  and  perhaps 
the  most  influential  man  in  the  city,  being  head  of  all  the 
deaf  and  dumb  institutions  in  Tuscany,  and  of  the  College  of 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  33^ 

Tolomei,  as  well  as  Professor  in  the  University — even  Patire 
Pendola  refused  to  be  convinced.  "  It  is  not  possible,"  he 
repeated  to  the  Frenchman's  pleadings;  "the  young  nobles 
of  Tuscany  are  too  soft,  too  idle;  you  never  could  get  them 
to  visit  the  poor."  He  spent  his  last  evening  in  trying  to 
persuade  the  Padre,  but,  beyond  a  warmly-expressed  hope 
that  the  future  might  see  the  scheme  realized,  the  latter  re- 
mained unmoved,  and  Ozanam  left  him  more  downcast  than 
he  had  been  in  the  whole  course  of  his  illness.  "  I  am  no 
longer  good  for  anything ;  God  will  not  deign  to  make  use 
of  me  any  more,"  he  said,  when  he  came  home  tired  and 
crestfallen;  and  he  confessed  it  was  only  the  hope,  amount- 
ing to  certainty,  that  he  would  have  succeeded  in  rendering  a 
last  service  to  the  poor  which  had  enabled  him  to  undertake 
the  journey. 

This  was  at  the  end  of  June.  They  went  on  to  Antignano, 
a  little  village  overlooking  the  sea,  and  there  Ozanam  deter- 
mined to  make  a  final  effort.  He  wrote  to  Padre  Pendola, 
adjuring  him  to  yield  to  his  entreaties  and  take  the  cause  of 
his  beloved  confraternity  in  hand  : 

"...  All  that  you  hare  done  for  myselt  and  my  little  family  touched  me 
less,  Reverend  Father,  than  the  hope  you  held  out  to  me  at  the  last  in  favor 
of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  This  dear  Society  is  also  ray  family.  Next  to  God, 
it  was  the  means  of  preserving  my  faith  after  I  left  my  good  and  pious 
parents.  I  love  it,  therefore,  and  cling  to  it  with  all  my  heart ;  it  has  been  a 
joy  to  me  to  see  the  good  seed  growing  and  prospering  in  Tuscan  soil. 

"Above  all,  I  have  seen  it  do  so  much  good,  sustain  so  many  young  men  in 
the  path  of  virtue,  and  inspire  a  smaller  number  with  such  wonderful  zeal  1 
We  have  Conferences  at  Quebec  and  in  Mexico.  We  have  them  at  Jerusalem. 
We  most  certainly  have  one  in  Paradise,  for  during  the  twenty  years  that  we 
have  existed  at  least  a  thousand  members  have  taken  the  road  to  a  better 
world.  How,  then,  is  it  possible  that  we  should  not  have  one  at  Siena,  which 
is  called  the  antechamber  0/  Paradise  ?  How  is  it  possible  that  in  the  city  of 
Our  Blessed  Lady  a  work  whose  chief  patroness  she  is  should  not  succeed  ? 
.  .  .  You  have  amongst  your  children  many  who  are  rich,  Reverend  Father — 
oh  1  what  a  salutary  lesson,  how  strengthening  for  those  soft  young  hearts,  to 
show  them  the  poor,  to  show  them  Jesus  Christ,  not  in  pictures  painted  by 
great  masters  or  on  altars  resplendent  with  gold  and  light,  but  to  show  them 
Jesus  Christ  and  His  wounds  in  the  persons  of  the  poor  !  We  have  often 
talked  together  of  the  weakness,  the  effeminacy,  the  inanity  of  even  Christian 


33^  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

men  amongst  the  nobility  of  France  and  Italy ;  but  I  am  satisfied  this  arises 
from  a  want  in  their  education.  There  is  one  thing  they  have  not  been  taught ; 
there  is  one  thing  they  are  only  acquainted  with  by  name,  and  which  we  must 
have  seen  others  suffer  from  in  order  to  learn  how  to  bear  it  ourselves  when, 
sooner  or  later,  our  turn  comes.  This  one  thing  is  sorrow,  privation,  want. 
These  young  seigneurs  ought  to  know  what  hunger  and  thirst  and  the  destitu- 
tion of  a  naked  garret  mean.  They  ought  to  see  fellow-creatures  in  misery, 
distress — sick  children,  little  ones  crying  with  hunger.  They  ought  to  see 
them  that  they  may  love  them.  Either  the  spectacle  would  make  their  hearts 
beat  with  awakened  pulses  or  they  are  a  lost  generation.  But  we  should  never 
believe  in  the  death  of  a  young  Christian  soul.  '  She  is  not  dead,  but  sleep- 
eth.'  Dear  and  estimable  friend,  I  send  you,  in  the  Bulletin  of  the  Society, 
some  excellent  instructions  on  the  ^formation  of  Conferences  in  houses  of  edu- 
cation.'' Assuredly  your  experience  needs  not  to  be  enlightened.  .  .  .  Soon 
your  best  young  men,  divided  into  little  batches  of  three  and  four,  and  accom- 
panied by  a  master,  will  be  nimbly  ascending  the  poor  man's  stairs,  and  you 
will  see  them  coming  home  sad  and  happy— sad  at  the  sight  of  the  wretched- 
ness they  have  seen,  happy  at  having  even  ever  so  little  relieved  it.  Some  will 
go  about  it  coldly,  perhaps,  without  zeal  or  inteUigence  ;  others,  on  the  con- 
trary, will  take  fire  at  the  work,  and  will  pass  on  their  heat  to  places  where  no 
Conferences  yet  exist,  or  they  will  rekindle  the  warmth  of  those  that  are  al- 
ready in  existence,  .  .  .  and  out  of  all  this  good  a  portion  will  be  taken,  and 
added  to  the  crown  which  God  is  preparing  for  Padre  Pendola,  but  which  He 
will  give  him,  I  earnestly  hope,  as  late  as  possible. 

*' And  now  it  dawns  on  me  that  I  am  practising  the  old  French  proverb, 
Gros  Jean  veut  pi'tcher  son  curi!  No,  no,  my  Father,  it  is  not  I  who  am 
preaching ;  it  is  you,  your  example,  your  charity  that  are  preaching  to  me,  and 
bidding  me  leave  this  good  work  confidently  in  your  hands." 

Ozanam  waited  a  fortnight  for  an  answer  to  this  letter ;  it 
came  then,  brief  and  pregnant :  "  My  dear  friend,  I  founded 
yesterday,  the  Feast  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  two  Conferences, 
one  in  my  college  and  one  in  the  town." 

He  was  very  happy  after  this.  Everything  amused  and 
pleased  him.  He  was  full  of  sympathy  with  the  joys  of  Hfe 
that  were  opening  out  to  others,  while  they  were  swiftly  pass- 
ing away  from  him.  A  friend  writes  to  announce  his  ap- 
proaching marriage,  and  Ozanam  answers  gaily : 

"  Ha  !  ha  1  so  he  is  caught  at  last,  the  impregnable !  The  free  heart  has 
been  taken  captive  and  put  in  chains — silken  and  golden  chains,  bonds  that 
possess  everything  to  charm  the  eyes  and  the  ears,  the  imagination  and  the 
reason.  The  good  fairies  vi^ho  destined  him  this  fair  companion  took  care  to 
load  her  with  their  fairy  gifts ;   they  crowned  her  with  all  the  graces ;  no 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  337 

wonder  the  proud  freeman  capitulated  !  .  .  .  You  deserved  to  meet  with  one 
of  those  souls  whose  society  constitutes  the  joy  and  the  honor  of  our  destiny. 
Such  meetings  are  rare  here  below,  and  only  those  who  have  experienced  their 
blessedness  have  a  right  to  speak  of  them  ;  and  so  I  congratulate  you.  I  re- 
joice, as  at  a  good  omen,  over  the  name  of  Amelie,  by  which  you  will  call 
your  wife.  Is  it  after  us  also  that  you  choose  the  23d  for  the  day  of  your 
wedding  ?    The  23d  brings  luck." 

His  playful  appeal  to  M.  Ampere  for  an  alms  to  his  "  beg- 
gars "  in  the  Revue des  Deux  Mondes  had  not  been  made  in  vain. 
A  brilliant  review  of  the  Foeies  Franciscains  appeared  in  that 
periodical  in  June,  and  was  a  source  of  great  pleasure  to 
Ozanam,  in  whom  the  author  was  still  strong  enough  to  be 
keenly  alive  to  an  enlightened  criticism. 

*•  You  have  far  surpassed  my  hopes ;  you  have  overpowered  me  and  my  poor 
Franciscans,"  he  says  to  the  critic.  "  I  must  thank  you  in  the  name  of  those 
dear  beggars,  who  come  to  life  again  under  your  touch,  and  whom  you  paint 
better  in  this  brief  sketch  than  I  in  my  long  gallery.  Your  three  pages  have 
the  perfume  of  that  convent  garden  which  you  describe  with  the  jessamine 
creeping  along  the  wall.  Amelie  and  I,  being  impartial  judges  in  the  case, 
have  agreed  that  this  short  article  is  one  of  your  most  exquisite  touches.  I 
must  say  that  your  word  of  regret  for  the  absent  Professor  touched  something 
deeper  than  self-love,  and  had  an  accent  that  went  to  my  very  heart.  ...  A 
certain  Padre  Frederic,  himself  a  Franciscan,  and  a  poet  greatly  admired  at 
Florence,  is  going  to  publish  a  translation  of  the  little  volume,  and,  from  the 
silence  of  his  cell  in  Ara  Coeli,  the  General  of  the  Order  has  addressed  his 
thanks  to  me  with  a  diploma,  which  is  not  the  least  precious  of  my  titles.  He 
places  me  on  the  list  of  the  benefactors  of  the  Franciscan  family,  and  associates 
me  to  the  merits  of  the  Frires-Mineurs,  who  work  and  pray  for  all  the 
world." 

He  had  looked  forward,  while  it  was  possible,  to  following 
up  his  candidature  for  the  Institute  this  summer,  on  his  return 
to  Paris,  but  in  spite  of  the  rally,  which  still  maintained  itself, 
he  saw  it  was  vain  to  cling  to  the  hope. 

•' Ahermit  of  Montenero  has  no  business  to  think  of  the  Academy  of  In- 
scriptions," he  says  good-humoredly  to  ti.  Ampere.  "In  making  up  my  mind 
to  remain  in  Italy,  I  necessarily  gave  up  the  chance  of  canvassing  for  the 
venerable  M.  Vtirdcssus'  faiiteuil.  .  .  .  Moreover,  in  a  moment  of  such  solemn 
import,  wlicn  all  other  questions  of  the  future  hang  upon  the  supreme  question 
of  my  health,  when  I  am  asking  God  to  grant  me  life  for  the  sake  of  my  wife 
and  child,  it  seems  to  me  that  there  would  be  a  kind  of  temerity  in  asking  for 
anything  superfluous,  for  what  flatters  my  literary  self-love.     It  seems  to  me 


338  Life  and  Works  of  Freikric  Ozajiam. 

that  I  ought  to  wait  humbly  on  Providence  until  it  is  decided  whether  I  am  to 
be  cured  or  not,  and  if  God  permits  me  to  resume  my  career,  then  I  may  legiti- 
mately aspire  to  those  honors  which  would  put  the  crown  upon  it." 

He  continued  to  work  at  his  Odyssey,  as  he  called  it,  al- 
though his  weakness  had  greatly  increased  after  his  removal 
to  Antignano;  he  could  only  write  a  few  lines  at  a  time, 
being  compelled  to  rest  on  his  sofa  during  the  intervals.  The 
closing  pages  of  this  exquisite  narrative  are  almost  the  last  he 
ever  wrote.  By  the  time  he  had  finished  them  he  was  no 
longer  able  to  hold  a  pen,  except  to  write  down  some  fugitive 
thoughts  and  short  prayers  which  his  wife  was  anxious  to  pre- 
serve. Up  to  the  end  of  July  he  was  able  to  walk  out  a  little 
in  the  evening,  and  to  go  to  Mass  every  morning.  The 
church  was  at  only  a  few  minutes'  distance  from  the  little  villa 
where  he  lived.  It  was  in  the  fortress,  a  remnant  of  those 
stormy  ages  when  the  blue  Mediterranean  was  ploughed  up  by 
the  ships  of  the  Saracen,  and  its  peaceful  shores  turned  into 
bloody  battle-fields.  Ozanam  had  been  the  object  of  many 
flattering  tokens  from  the  highest  personages  during  his  stay 
in  Tuscany.  He  had  been  made  a  member  of  the  Academy 
of  La  Trusca  simultaneously  with  Count  Cesare  Balbo ;  all 
the  social  and  learned  notabilities  had  sought  him  out,  anxious 
to  testify  their  admiration  and  regard.  He  was  grateful  for 
this,  but  indifferent  to  it.  He  had  always  rather  avoided 
than  sought  the  notice  of  the  great  ones  of  the  earth,  and  now 
that  death  was  casting  its  vivid  light  over  the  vanities  of  life, 
these  attentions  became  irksome  and  distasteful  Xo  him.  He 
avoided  receiving  visitors  of  rank  when  it  was  possible.  If 
the  Prince  X.  drove  up  to  the  villa  in  his  fine  equipage  and 
requested  "  the  honor  of  making  the  great  savanfs  acquain- 
tance," Ozanam  would  send  a  courteous  message  excusing 
himself  on  the  plea  of  his  extreme  exhaustion ;  but  if,  the 
same  evening,  as  it  once  happened,  a  poor  young  man  walked 
in  the  dust  and  heat  all  the  way  from  Leghorn  to  obtain  some 
information  as  to  how  he  should  found  a  Conference  in  his 
native  village,  he  was  joyfully  received,  and  the  dying  man 


Life  and  Works  of  Fredetic  Gzanam.  339 

would  gather  up  his  strength  to  converse  with  him  for  two 
hours.  The  surest  way  to  rouse,  and  even  reheve  hini,  was  to 
give  him  the  opportunity  of  doing  good. 

There  were  a  few  kind  famihes  on  tlie  coast  who  used  to 
come  and  see  him  often;  amongst  them  the  Ferruccis,  so 
well  known  now  through  the  fame  of  their  saintly  Rosa. 
Ozanam  enjoyed  their  visits  so  long  as  he  was  able  to  see 
any  one ;  but  none,  perhaps,  were  so  tenderly  welcome  as 
those  of  his  brothers  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul.  It  was  indeed 
touching  to  see  their  cordial  affection  for  him,  and  the  simple, 
kindly  ways  they  had  of  showing  it.  Three  young  men  who 
lived  near  Leghorn  came  constantly  to  see  him,  then  merely 
to  ask  how  he  was,  and  if  they  could  not  be  of  any  use  by 
doing  some  litde  commission  at  Leghorn  for  Madame  Oza- 
nam. One  afternoon  they  came  laden  with  flowers  and  a 
provision  of  ice  and  snow,  which  was  not  to  be  had  at  An- 
tignano;  he  was  in  great  pain  accompanied  with  fever;  they 
went  away  with  sad  hearts.  About  three  o'clock  the  same 
morning  the  servant  was  awoke  by  a  noise  as  of  sand  flung  at 
the  window ;  it  was  the  young  men,  who  had  come  back 
with  more  ice,  unable  in  their  anxiety  to  pass  all  night  witli- 
out  news  of  the  sick  man ;  they  were  going  to  walk  back 
again,  but  Madame  Ozanam  insisted  on  their  resting  the  re- 
mainder of  tlie  night  at  the  villa.  The  fishermen  and  i)eas- 
ants  of  the  neighborhood  had  grown  attached  to  the  "  saintly 
stranger,"  and  carried  their  graceful  tribute  of  sympathy  in 
flowers  and  fruit  to  him,  and  assuredly  none  were  more  grate- 
fully received  by  the  humble  and  loving  heart  that  so  prized 
the  affection  of  simple  souls. 

From  the  beginning  of  August  he  was  not  able  to  go  be- 
yond the  terrace  before  the  house;  on  the  eve  of  the  15th, 
however,  he  declared  he  would  go  to  the  church  and  hear 
Mass  the  next  day.  His  heart  seemed  so  set  on  it  that  his 
wife  had  not  the  courage  to  oppose  him ;  accordingly  she 
sent  to  Leghorn  to  order  a  carriage;  but  when  Ozanam 
heard  this,  he  said  he  preferred  to  walk,     *'  If  it  is  to  be  my 


340  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam, 

last  walk  on  earth,  let  it  be  to  the  house  of  God  on  the  Feast 
of  the  Assumption !"  he  said ;  and  so,  leaning  on  her  whom 
he  so  truly  called  his  guardian  angel,  he  set  out  on  foot. 
The  villagers  knew  he  was  coming,  and  assembled  outside 
the  church,  to  testify  their  affectionate  sympathy.  As  Oza- 
nam  came  slowly  on,  looking  like  a  spirit  in  his  transparent 
pallor,  the  men  all  bared  their  heads,  and  the  women  and 
children  greeted  him  with  a  pretty  wave  of  the  hand,  their 
graceful  manner  of  saluting.  He  was  moved  to  tears  by  the 
homage. 

But  another  more  touching  still  awaited  him.  The  old  cure 
of  Antignano  was  dying;  but  when  he  heard  that  Ozanam 
had  come  to  the  church,  and  wished  to  receive  Communion 
before  Mass,  he  said  to  those  about  him,  "Get  me  up;  I 
must  give  it  to  him ;  no  one  else  shall  have  that  privilege." 
They  dressed  him,  and  he  was  assisted  downstairs.  The 
church  was  garlanded  with  flowers,  and  brilliantly  hghted  up 
in  honor  of  Our  Lady's  Assumption ;  the  contadini,  too,  wore 
their  gala  dresses  in  her  honor.  Chance  seemed  to  have  in- 
vested the  scene  with  the  grace  and  glory  of  a  bridal  pageant ; 
but  there  were  tears  instead  of  smiles  amongst  the  spectators 
when  the  husband,  supported  by  his  young  wife,  advanced  to 
the  altar,  and  knelt  down  by  her  side,  they  two  alone,  as  they 
had  been  twelve  years  ago  on  that  other  bridal  day  of  which 
this  was  the  crown  and  completion.  The  dying  priest,  assist- 
ed likewise  in  his  weakness,  came  forth  and  administered 
Communion  to  them,  and  then  was  led  away.  It  was  the 
last  time  he  exercised  his  priestly  office  on  earth ;  he  never 
left  his  room  again ;  neither  was  Ozanam  ever  again  present 
at  the  holy  sacrifice. 

Three  days  after  this  he  added  a  codicil  to  his  will,  which 
had  been  made  at  Pisa  on  his  birthday.  It  is  dated  the  i8th 
August,  1853,  Antignano.  The  following  is  an  extract  from 
the  will  itself: 

•'  In  the  name  of  the  Father,  of  the  Son,  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  ...  I 
commit  my  soiil  to  Jesus  Christ  my  Saviour ;  with  fear  because  of  my  sins,  but 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam,  341 

confiding  in  infinite  mercy,  I  die  in  the  bosom  of  the  Catholic,  Apostolic,  and 
Roman  Church.  I  have  known  the  doubts  of  the  present  «ige,  but  jdl  my  life 
has  convinced  me  that  there  is  no  rest  for  the  mind  and  the  heart  except  in  the 
faith  of  that  Church  and  under  her  authority.  If  I  attach  any  value  to  my  long 
studies,  it  is  because  they  give  me  the  right  to  entreat  those  I  love  to  remain 
faithful  to  a  religion  where  I  found  light  and  peace. 

"  My  supreme  prayer  to  my  wife,  my  child,  my  brothers  and  brothers-in-law, 
and  all  those  who  may  be  born  of  them,  is  to  persevere  in  the  faith,  in  spite  of 
the  humiliations,  the  scandals,  and  the  desertions  they  will  be  witness  of. 

"  To  my  tender  Amelia,  who  has  made  the  joy  of  my  life,  and  whose  de- 
voted care  has  consoled  my  long  sufferings,  I  address  a  farewell — short,  like  all 
earthly  things.  I  thank  her,  I  bless  her,  I  await  her.  It  is  only  in  heaven  that 
I  shall  be  able  to  give  her  back  all  the  love  she  deserves.  I  give  to  my  child 
the  blessing  of  the  patriarchs,  in  the  name  of  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the 
Holy  Ghost.  It  grieves  me  not  to  be  able  to  carry  on  further  the  dear  labor  of 
her  education,  but  I  confide  it  without  fear  to  her  virtuous  mother. 

"  To  my  brothers  Alphonse  and  Charles  I  offer  my  sincere  gratitude  for 
their  affection — to  my  brother  Charles  especially,  for  the  anxious  care  my 
health  has  caused  him.  To  my  mother,  Madame  Soulacroix,  to  Charles  Sou- 
lacroix,  I  give  a  rendezvous  amidst  those  over  whom  we  have  wept  together. 
I  embrace  in  one  thought  all  those  whom  I  cannot  mention  here  by  name.  .  .  . 
I  thank  once  more  all  those  who  have  been  kind  to  me.  I  ask  pardon  for  my 
hastiness  and  bad  example.  I  implore  the  prayers  of  my  friends,  of  the  Soci- 
ety of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul. 

"Let  not  your  zeal  be  slackened  by  those  who  will  say,  He  is  in  heaven. 
Pray  unceasingly  for  one  who  loved  you  all  much,  but  who  has  sinned  much. 
Sure  of  your  supplications,  dear,  kind  friends,  I  shall  leave  this  world  with  less 
fear.  I  firmly  hope  that  we  shall  not  be  separated,  and  that  I  shall  remain  in 
the  midst  of  you  until  you  rejoin  me. 

"May  the  blessing  of  God  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  rest 
upon  all  of  you.    Amen." 


He  now  grew  rapidly  worse.  His  brothers  were  sent  for ; 
the  news  went  forth  to  his  friends  to  pray  for  him — that  he 
was  dying.  All  felt  it  as  a  private  grief  and  a  great  public 
loss. 


"  The  last  news  of  M.  Ozanam  is  heart-breaking,"  the  Abb^  Perreyve  writes. 
•'  Charles  had  a  telegram  from  Madame  Ozanam  four  days  ago,  saying  that 
the  dear  invalid  is  in  a  state  of  extreme  weakness.  ...  I  cannot  tell  you  the 
profound  griet  that  this  telegram  has  been  to  the  hearts  of  all  those  who  knew 
and  loved  M.  Ozanam.  What  a  loss  for  all  that  was  right,  religion,  truth  ! 
But,  above  all,  what  a  loss  for  me,  whom  he  loved  !  I  assure  you  that  his  death 
will  be  for  me  a  great  sorrow,  and  I  would  give  many  days  of  my  own  life  to 
redeem  it.    How  feeble  our  prayers  are  1    Are  there  no  more  saints  any- 


342  Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam. 

where  ?    And  who  was  more  worthy  of  a  miracle,  if  a  miracle  there  must 
be? 

♦'  But  I  will  stifle  the  murmurs  that  are  rising  in  the  depths  of  my  heart. 
God  has  His  own  designs  on  souls.  There  are  those  whom  He  means  to  make 
into  great  saints,  and  who  therefore  have  need  of  great  sorrows,  .  .  .  But 
meanwhile  this  is  sad,  and  calls  for  tceirs.  Pray  for  him  in  your  Mass.  Who 
knows  ?  Perhaps  God  is  only  waiting  for  a  last  great  effort  on  our  part  to 
grant  us  this  grace.  For  my  part,  I  could  ask  nothing  yesterday  of  our  Lord 
but  that  He  would  grant  him  the  grace  of  a  calm  death,  without  agony,  with 
sure  hope  of  heavenly  rest.  The  mere  sound  of  the  word  rest  has  something 
appropriate  and  touching  in  it  applied  to  that  sensitive,  impressionable  soul.  O 
how  he  will  enjoy  that  serenity  of  bliss,  whose  very  foundation  is  the  immuta- 
bility of  God  1"  * 

Yet  Ozanam  was  far  from  enjoying  this  serene  sense  of  se- 
curity which  others  felt  regarding  him.  He  had  always  had 
a  great  fear  of  death,  or  rather  of  what  makes  death  terrible — 
judgment;  and  now  that  the  shadow  of  the  Great  White 
Throne  was  upon  him,  this  feeling  deepened  in  intensity.  He 
spoke  frequently  of  his  sins,  of  the  punishment  they  merited, 
of  the  scandal  they  had  caused,  the  world  expecting  so  much 
from  Catholics,  who  profess  to  embody  the  faith  in  their 
actions.  Once,  when  he  seemed  more  than  usually  impressed 
by  these  considerations,  one  near  him  thought  to  soothe  him 
by  suggesting  tenderly  that  after  all  he  had  not  been  such  a 
great  sinner;  but  Ozanam  answered  quickly,  in  a  tone  of 
austere  humility,  "  Child,  you  do  not  know  what  the  sanctity 
of  God  is!" 

His  piety  seemed  to  grow  more  fervent  as  his  bodily  pros- 
tration increased.  He  read  the  Bible  almost  constantly  now, 
and  would  remain  for  hours  rapt  in  meditation  on  it,  express- 
ing himself  from  time  to  time  in  a  sublime  manner  on  various 
passages,  in  the  Psalms  and  the  Book  of  Job  especially.  The 
words  of  Scripture  took  such  complete  possession  of  his  mind 
that  they  made  him  oblivious  of  what  was  going  on  around 
him.  It  had  always  been  a  great  pain  to  him  to  inflict  the 
least  trouble  or  fatigue  on  others,  but  now  that  his  condition 
exacted  more  laborious  attendance  than  ever,  he  submitted  to 

•  This  letter  is  dated  "August  8"  in  the  collection  of  the  Abb(i  Perreyve's  letters,  byt  it  \% 
flesrly  a  mistake.    Charles  did  not  rejoin  his  brother  until  quite  the  end  of  August 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  343 

it  almost  unconsciously ;  it  was  sufficient  to  recite  aloud  some 
verses  of  the  Psalms  while  he  was  suffering  most  to  make  him 
forget  his  own  pain  and  the  distress  of  those  who  were  striv- 
ing to  alleviate  it.  He  frequently  greeted  his  wife  with  those 
words  which  he  loved  to  apply  to  himself:  "It  has  been 
written  at  the  beginning  of  the  Book  that  I  should  do  Thy 
will,  my  God.  I  have  willed  it,  and  placed  Thy  law  in  the 
midst  of  my  heart."  He  lived  almost  out  of  doors,  stretched 
on  his  sofa,  which  had  been  wheeled  out  to  the  terrace,  and 
there  he  would  lie  silent  for  hours  with  the  Bible  open  by  his 
side.  One  evening  he  lay  thus,  watching  the  sun  sinking  into 
the  blue  Mediterranean  ;  his  wife  had  drawn  her  chair  a  little 
behind  him,  that  he  might  not  see  the  tears  she  could  not 
restrain,  when  something  in  the  extreme  serenity  of  his  coun- 
tenance prompted  her  to  ask  which  of  all  the  gifts  of  God  he 
considered  the  greatest.  He  replied  without  hesitating, 
as  if  the  question  had  fallen  in  with  his  own  thoughts, 
"  Peace  of  heart ;  without  this  we  may  possess  everything  and 
yet  not  be  happy ;  with  it  we  can  bear  the  hardest  trials  and 
the  approach  of  death." 

A  few  days  later  they  were  sitting  together  on  the  terrace  lis- 
tening to  the  murmur  of  summer  seas  and  the  birds  singing  in 
the  ilex  grove,  when  Ozanam,  after  along  silence,  began  to  speak 
with  regret  of  his  interrupted  work.  "  If  anything  consoles  me," 
he  said,  "  for  leaving  this  world  without  having  accomplished 
what  I  wished  to  do,  it  is  that  I  have  never  worked  for  the 
praise  of  men,  but  always  for  the  service  of  truth."  Such  a 
testimony  was  indeed  a  consolation  worthy  of  his  noble  life. 
Ozanam  thought  he  had  lived  to  no  purpose ;  that  his  life 
had  been  a  failure  because  he  left  his  work  unfinished.  It  is 
always  so  with  souls  like  his.  They  trace  the  furrow  and 
scatter  the  seed,  and  then  pass  on,  leaving  others  to  come  and 
reap  the  fruit.  No  man  ever  fully  achieved  his  life's  pro- 
gramme except  Him  who  came  down  from  heaven  to  do  His 
Father's  business,  and,  having  done  it,  died. 

For  the  last  twelve  years  of  his  life  Ozanam  had  the  grace- 


344  ^f^  ^^  Works  oj  Frederic  Oza7tam. 

ful  habit  of  presenting  some  flowers  to  his  wife  on  the  23d  of 
every  month,  the  date  of  their  marriage.  He  remembered  it 
now,  and  when  the  festive  day  came  round,  he  greeted  her  in 
the  morning  with  a  branch  of  lovely  flowering  myrtle,  which 
he  had  sent  for  to  the  shore,  having  heard  her  admire  it. 

On  the  last  day  of  August  they  left  Antignano.  His  two 
brothers  had  arrived  to  take  him  back  to  France.  He  had 
prayed  for  this  last  grace,  to  be  allowed  to  die  in  his  own 
country  and  amongst  his  own  people.  When  all  was  ready 
for  the  departure,  and  the  carriage  awaited  him  at  the  door, 
he  expressed  a  wish  to  go  and  look  upon  the  sea  once  more ; 
his  wife  and  one  of  his  brothers  assisted  him  to  the  terrace,  and 
he  stood  for  a  moment  gazing  at  the  waves  breaking  upon  the 
beach ;  then,  baring  his  head  in  the  sunlight,  he  lifted  up  his 
hands  and  said  aloud,  "  O  my  God !  I  thank  Thee  for  the 
afflictions  and  the  sufferings  Thou  hast  sent  me  in  this  place; 
accept  them  in  expiation  ot  my  sins."  Then,  turning  to  his 
wife,  he  said,  **  I  should  like  you,  too,  to  give  thanks  with  me 
for  my  sufferings." 

They  prayed  in  silence  for  a  moment,  and  then,  clasping 
her  in  his  arms,  he  cried  out,  "  And,  O  my  Lord !  I  bless 
Thee  for  the  consolations  Thou  hast  granted  me." 

He  was  assisted  on  deck,  and  lay  there  watching  the  shores 
of  Italy  till  they  faded  from  his  view.  The  sea  was  calm  as  a 
lake,  the  skies  were  cloudless.  He  bore  the  voyage  without 
much  apparent  fatigue.  As  the  shores  of  Provence  came  in 
sight,  he  burst  out  into  subdued  thanksgiving  at  being  per- 
mitted to  see  France  again.  When  the  vessel  entered  the 
harbor  of  Marseilles,  he  roused  himself  as  with  a  last  effort, 
and  said  almost  cheerfully  to  his  mother-in  law,  and  other 
members  of  his  wife's  family  who  had  come  to  meet  him, 
**  Now  that  I  have  placed  Am^lie  in  the  proper  hands,  God 
may  do  what  He  sees  fit  with  me !  " 

He  cherished  the  hope  ot  going  on  to  Paris,  and  dying 
amidst  the  scenes  ol  his  labors ;  but  this  wish  was  not  grant- 
ed \  he  was  far  too  exhausted  to  bear  the  additional  journey. 


Life  and  Works  of  Frederic  Ozanam.  345 

His  arrival  at  Marseilles  was  quickly  known,  and  the 
brotherhood  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul  hastened  to  his  door  with 
every  testimony  of  sorrow  and  respect.  He  was  too  ill  to  see 
any  of  them,  but  he  was  greatly  touched  to  hear  of  their  con- 
stant visits.  Nothing  could  surpass  the  serenity  that  his  soul 
now  enjoyed  ;  every  trace  of  fear,  of  apprehension  had  vanish- 
ed :  all  bodily  suffering  had  likewise  ceased,  and  he  appeared 
like  one  already  dweUing  in  the  sensible  presence  of  God ; 
he  seldom  spoke,  but  communed  still  with  his  beloved  ones 
by  a  pressure  of  the  hand,  a  sign,  and  that  smile  that  lay  like 
a  halo  on  the  wasted  face,  touching  it  already  with  the  peace 
that  passeth  all  understanding.  Feeling  that  the  end  was 
near,  he  himself  asked  for  the  last  sacraments,  and  received 
them  with  great  fervor  and  the  liveliest  consciousness.  When 
all  was  over,  his  brother,  remembering  how  keenly  he  had 
feared  the  Divine  judgments,  urged  him  gently  to  have  con- 
fidence in  the  great  mercy  of  God ;  but  Ozanam,  as  if  he  un- 
derstood not  the  allusion,  answered  with  a  look  of  sweet  sur- 
prise, "  Why  should  I  fear  Him  ?    I  love  Him  so  much  !  " 

On  the  evening  of  the  8th  of  September,  the  Feast  of  Our 
Lady's  Nativity,  the  summons  came.  His  wife  was  beside 
him,  and  his  brothers,  and  a  few  near  relatives.  The  adjoin- 
ing room  was  crowded  with  those  other  brothers,  the  members 
of  the  Society  of  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  who  knelt  in  silence, 
joining  in  the  prayers  that  were  speeding  their  founder  into 
the  presence  of  his  Judge.  He  had  fallen  into  a  gentle  slum- 
ber, waking  up  at  intervals  to  murmur  a  blessing,  a  word  of 
love,  an  invocation. 

Suddenly  opening  his  dark  eyes  in  a  wide,  startled  gaze,  he 
lifted  up  his  hands  and  cried  out  in  a  loud  voice,  "  My  God  ! 
my  God !  have  mercy  on  me!  " 

They  were  his  last  words.  Frederic  Ozanam  had  passed 
into  the  light  of  his  Redeemer's  presence. 


Q. 


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